Name Awards

Help.. I have a blue tooth in my blue ear!

Isn’t it ironic that a technology project name, created a while ago and named after an ugly Scandinavian Viking war lord has become such a popular name that no one stops to think what the words Blue and Tooth used to mean in the English language. Pity the old vikings wore big woolly hats, so they didn’t end up with Blue Ears. Wouldn’t that have been a far more appropriate name for those flashing blue lights in many peoples’ ears nowadays?

Joost a minute YouTube while I dance with Hulu

For all those video startup sites up there beating their brains out trying to find a descriptive name like YouTube, take a minute to look at the names of their fast-growing professional competitors Joost and Hulu.

Despite its strong Dutch overtones (as if you know or care), Joost is an abstract word from the people who brought us Skype. They have major corporate funding, a strong international outlook and are growing like crazy. So they can call themselves whatever they like.. we will pass it around and get used to it quickly.

Hulu is somewhere in the middle.. almost an English or Hawaiian word… regardless it is a great emotional play off the ever popular word Hula. Not as abstract as Joost, but certainly not as descriptive as YouTube.. and only in USA do they call the TV a tube anyway.

Joost and Hulu deserve name awards… plus they are doing a great job of delivering smooth, quality video content.

Taiwan is at least trying to promote brands now

Taiwan as a whole has a joint marketing organization to promote their major brands. It is a little sad that they have to pay to advertise their top 20 brands, but if that is what it takes.. at least they now recognize the power therein. My old Taiwanese boss once told me that at home they are so busy competing with the guy down the street they don’t have time to think about global marketing and branding.

Of course, they all got a big wake up call when their major OEM’s (and their carefully preserverd brands) took their business off to other lands with even cheaper labor.

Anyway.. today an award to Taiwan.. and their top 3 brands are: TrendMicro, Asus and Acer.  See Business Week Oct 13 for more details or visit http://brandingtaiwan.org.

Joe Public embraces their fans

One of the joys of being both a namiac and a football fan (football as played with the feet and a round ball) is that I can study names while watching my sport. For years I have watched international soccer with one eye on all the sponsors’ banners when the action slowed down. And now that the Concacaf (what an awful group name) club teams are also playing for inter region club honors, we get to see interesting teams like Joe Public in action.

What a great team name. Only in Trinidad would they think this up. There is probably no better way embrace your fans in a relatively new team. So much better than copying the name off some famous European club and then trying to live up to a non-deserved reputation.

And their ladies team?  Of course it is called Jane Public!

Google calls it Chrome.. because it isn’t!

Names come about in many mysterious and wonderful ways, including accidents that work out. Such is the story apparently behind the new Chrome browser from Google. The engineering team was working hard to minimize the amount of chrome (as the trim on software windows is called). In fact they were obsessed by minimizing it and not having any at all insofar as possible.

Of course, during this process, they kept using and hearing the word chrome – and it is one of those English words that has such a good strong feeling about it. Eventually they had no better name and (at least for now) decided to call the product Google Chrome itself. So nice to own a key brand and word like Google – you can put anything after it. Even the word chrome that is featured as is in a number of software trademarks! Not to mention 500 or more other US trademark filings.

So please, help keep Google out of court. Only call it Google Chrome and don’t refer to Chrome as system software unless it comes from Via Technologies.