Archive for the ‘branding’ Category
I’ve moved my blog over to http://ambiguiti.es from now on. Over there I’ll be talking about web and mobile development, and maintain a more general blog relating to events, conferences, job postings, and other such news in the industry.
“This is an empty box”. I love it.
This really shows the contrast between a young and aging tech brand.
BTW, if you’re curious about iPhone packaging.. See my earlier post.
So I was working on a project today and I had to plug into the Google News API.. I tested it with our Company name and out came this article:
An Account Registering Frenzy – Sign up for Nothing (Jeremy Wagstaff)
The article essentially says that a big part of Web2.0 are the insane number of new services requiring registration.. we register, provide tonnes of personal data.. then forget about the service.. Now our idle account is sitting out there in a veritable boneyard of abandoned services.. So why was our name mentioned? Because the author was coming up with a list of silly-sounding Web2.0 names (of actual companies) and must have stumbled across ours at some point (I’m guessing from RobotReplay).
Is “Nitobi” really that wierd-sounding? I didn’t think so before now. Yeah ok it’s not an English word or compound-word like “Elastic Path”, or “Adobe”.. It’s not someone’s last name “Dell”, “Eaton’s”, etc. I don’t think anyone needs to defend it by pointing out the plenty of other silly names that have done just fine (hint: “Google”, “Yahoo”, “Flickr”, etc).
But why did we choose Nitobi?
First and foremost, we wanted a name that was:
Meeting those criteria was hard enough. Next we wanted something that spoke to our team. We happen to be located in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia, home of my alma mater the University of British Columbia, where you will find the incredible Nitobe gardens– a Japanese botanical garden. We felt it was a symbol that represented a lot about who we are: a pacific rim city, and an outdoors-oriented bunch of people. We changed the ‘e’ to an ‘i’ to avoid bugging the real Nitobe gardens, and we had a name!
If anyone has any thoughts on our name or branding.. or on web2.0 names in general… would be cool to hear what they are!
BTW.. if you want a Web2.0 name generator: http://www.lightsphere.com/dev/web20.html
You are currently browsing the archives for the Uncategorized category.