February 2, 2012
Baby bumps have been sexy for a while, but baby boomers? Think again. As more of the U.S. enters its golden years, a bevy of brands sees a golden opportunity to court an ignored demographic. According to this recent Co.Design article, “People over 50 account for 67 percent of America’s consumption…only 5 pecent of marketing […]
August 24, 2011
In general I’m not a fan of initialisms in product and company naming. Unless they form real words (acronyms), they usually convey nothing at first blush and they make the customer work too hard. Of course, if you’re a world-renowned brand like AT&T, IBM, or BMW, it doesn’t matter that no one remembers what your initials […]
June 22, 2010
Apple has now licensed their second trademark from Cisco. First they settled with Cisco and licensed “iPhone” (Cisco previously owned the trademark for handset phones). Now Apple has launched their new operating system name, iOS, also a Cisco registered trademark. Is Apple simply browsing the list of Cisco trademarks that start with “i” and retrofitting […]
April 15, 2010
This item was originally published on April 1, 2010 at Fast Company. I was in a meeting with Vinod Khosla once, about a thousand years ago in Internet time (which would make it roughly 2001). We were discussing how, even then, it was tough to find names for Silicon Valley companies that were interesting and […]