Wha'chu talkin' 'bout, Willis?

The Sears Tower, America's tallest building, is being renamed The Willis Tower as a result of a major new tenant, Willis Group Holdings. That's it. We just could not resist the post title.

Tasty Tidbits from the past week...

Sometimes we find juicy news not worthy of a full blog post, yet too darn good to not share with you. These "Tasty Tidbits" are digestible bites of news about new names and the naming industry and what we think of them here at Eat My Words. Bon Appetit!

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Oracle announced its first hardware product this week, called Exadata. Yawn. Apparently, Oracle has been working on this product for three years. However, it sounds like they started working on the name part about three days ago and grabbed something off of a whiteboard at the last minute. We can't find a description anywhere on the Oracle website on the meaning of Exadata, but they show a picture of the product that has an "X" on it, so that makes it clear....

Also, there is a joint HP /Oracle product that is being simultaneously released, which they are calling....wait for it......the

HP Oracle Database Machine

Really? Isn't that a description rather than a name?

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison refers to the products as "radical new thinking". Maybe, but not so much for the names.

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In the "Sure, That Will Fix the Problem" files comes this "rebranding" news from WPP Group's MindShare:

"The agency's North American senior executives are relinquishing their formal job titles. For example, Scott Neslund, CEO of Mindshare North America, will now be identified simply as Scott Neslund, Mindshare North America, the agency said."

In phase 2 of the job title changes to be implemented early next year, he will be identified simply as, "The Scottmeister".

Also, for no apparent reason, they will now be known as Mindshare, not MindShare. In related news, they are negotiating with the City of New York (their headquarters location) to change the city's spelling to neW yorK.

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Interesting Trademark Lawsuit of the week: Intel is suing Intellife Travel for trademark infringement. We are all for protection of your trademark, but come on.....

One is a small travel agency specializing in travel between North America and China and one is the world's leader in semiconductor technology. Well, we're confused, but not in the way Intel thinks we are.

Techcrunch lays it all out for us.

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We can't help our fascination with the trainwreck of an idea, Namethis.com. Watch later for our discussion why it cannot possibly succeed as a real business (hint: it has something to do with venture capital backers wanting an actual ROI). If anyone wants to give us $3 million, we'll tell you how to make it really work.

In the meantime, here is the Namethis.com lame name of the week: "Pixelouvre.com", an original name for a modern e-commerce art gallery. The company preferred a "one-word name" that "must be available as a .com". That one sentence alone explains dreck like Pixelouvre.com.

As anyone who knows anything about domain names knows, one-word names are all gone. Also, emphasis on names that must be available as .com forces the production of junk names. In any case, the explanation behind the creation of Pixelouvre.com is:

"pixel + louvre. pixel represents the ecommerce." (a pixel is a single point in a graphic image..how does that represent e-commerce exactly?) "louvre: an art museum that is a famous tourist attraction in Paris (Right.... Lucky it starts with an "L" or else it wouldn't have worked with pixe"l") "the domain is available" (there is a reason for that).

P.S. As of 6:00 am Pacific time on 09-26-08, Pixelouvre.com was still available, so maybe the company that bought the name doesn't want to waste another $9.99 to lock up this winner. We were going to buy it on a lark, but decided we didn't want to face a Pixelouvre.com domain dispute dustup. For free, we offer the following (domain names available) as backups: PixelSmithsonian.com, PixelMuseumOfModernArt.com and PixelTheGetty.com.

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Boy, Is Their Face Magenta

Deutsche Telekom has lost their trademark lawsuit in which they tried to corner the market on the color magenta for the T Mobile brand. They sued Telia and even sent a C&D letter to Engadget Mobile. From the T Mobile website:

T-Mobile is a federally registered trademark, and the magenta color is a trademark, of Deutsche Telekom AG.

Turns out the Telia's magenta is a slightly different hue than T Mobile's. Who knew? You decide:

There is no word yet if the The Rocky Horror Picture Show folks have been served yet:

Color trademarks fall into the "unconventional trademark" category which includes, smells, sounds, holograms, motion, aromas, tactile as well as color marks.

That Stinks ^TM