I haven’t blogged for a while about startupnamesthat endin -ly, but that doesn’t mean the trend is ebbing. On the contrary, I’m up to 153 – one hundred fifty-three! – pins on my “Names That End in -ly” Pinterest board.* The most recent additions: Fastly (“real-time caching”), Warmly (an alarm-clock app), and Scopely (a mobile gaming platform).
Also on Pinterest:
Shop at X & Y! (two-part retail names joined by an ampersand or plus sign)
The name duplication isn’t coincidental. The two brands are related.
Vornado fans were first manufactured toward the end of World War II; the inventor of the original technology, an Oklahoma man named Ralph K. Odor (really), had started experimenting in the 1920s with improved airplane-propeller efficiency. In 1931 he introduced the Vornado Plane.
The Vornado name comes from “vortex action” plus a suffix, probably from “tornado.” (A 1936 news account of the plane said it would “roar through the skies on the wings of a span of man-made tornadoes.”)
In the 1940s Odor partnered with a Kansas entrepreneur, O.A. Sutton, and after the war ended the O.A. Sutton Corporation produced the first Vornado fans. Odor quit not long afterward over a patent-rights dispute, and the O.A. Sutton Corporation went bankrupt in the 1950s. The Vornado brand and company were resurrected in Andover, Kansas, in 1989.
As for Vornado Realty Trust, it traces its history to an appliance chain originally called Two Guys from Harrison, founded in 1946 by brothers Sidney and Hubert Hubschman of Harrison, New Jersey. In 1959, Two Guys bought the defunct O.A. Sutton Corporation and renamed the merged company Vornado. At the company’s peak, according to a Wikipedia entry, there were more than 100 Two Guys locations nationwide. Profits began declining in the 1970s, and in 1980, Vornado was acquired by Interstate Department Stores, Inc., which changed its name to Vornado Realty Trust and began selling the retail stores and leasing their physical locations.
Today, Vornado Realty Trust is a publicly traded company and one of the largest owners and managers of commercial real estate in the United States. And Vornado fans for home, business, and industrial use are sold at Sears, Costco, Lowe’s, Home Depot, and other retailers worldwide.
It’s quite a business coup, and no surprise that the story made the front page of the New York Times.
Alas, the “Summly” name breaks no new ground at all. It may have been coined to suggest “summarize,” but it has an ambiguous sound (some? sum?) and a trite construction. Summly is the 147th pseudo-adverbial -ly name I’ve pinned on my Names That End in -ly Pinterest board.
Have you heard? Nokia has rebranded all of its navigation products with a single name: HERE.
The official story, in flawless brandbabble:
“HERE is a name that I think signifies what I call an ethos in cartography. HERE is about a sense of location,” said Michael Halbherr, the Nokia executive who oversees the company’s location and commerce unit, in an interview at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week. (Via TechCrunch, March 2)
I can’t explain why the name is in spelled in ALL CAPS everywhere on the website except in the logo.
And here’s more news: PayPal has introduced a new credit-card reader for mobile devices. It, too, is called Here.
“Here” focuses on the target audience and freshly, yet familiarly conveys its benefit: the ability to do business here and now, here and again, here there and everywhere.
However, if you happen to forget, as I did, which company makes the mapping Here and which one makes the payment Here, and you attempt to do a web search simply for “here” … well, you’ll learn some moderately interesting things about here documents and deixis and the Here Lounge in West Hollywood.
[W]hat was I to think about Doritos introducing the “JACKED” sub-line (I feel strongly it should be all caps) that boasts of Bigger, Bolder, Thicker chips? Should I be enthused, or worried? Was I like a smoker getting excited because his Camels would now contain triple the nicotine? And why “JACKED,” anyway? Were they going to contain Monterey or Cheddar Jack cheese (no), or was this just a doomed marketing attempt to seem appropriately “street” (almost certainly)?
Pronounced Jacked, the powder contains a stimulant that marketers say increases strength, speed and endurance. …
Yet, last April, federal health regulators issued a warning that the stimulant — called dimethylamylamine, or DMAA — frequently raises blood pressure and heart rate, and could lead to heart attacks. In December 2011, after the deaths of two soldiers who had used Jack3d, the Defense Department removed all products containing DMAA from stores on military bases, including more than 100 GNC shops.
Now the parents of Michael L. Sparling, one of the soldiers who died, have filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against USPlabs, the developer and marketer of Jack3d, and GNC, the store where he bought it.
1. Verb: Past tense Origin from ‘hijacked’: as the past-progressive meaning stolen in a violent fashion. Commonly refers to robbery, theft, misuse, seizure, possesion. 2. Adjective Well muscled, iron-bound, pumped.
1. “Yo, I got up to go to the bathroom and some jerk jacked my seat” or “Yesterday I jacked a pack of gum from the mall.” 2. “That weightlifter sure is jacked. Too bad he’s on steroids.”
“House of Cards,” a political thriller directed by David Fincher and starring Kevin Spacey as a US congressman, debuts today on Netflix. The show, based on a BBC miniseries of the same name, is the first show produced specifically for Netflix, which is releasing all 13 episodes at once.
“House of Lies,” a dramatic comedy about management consultants starring Don Cheadle, recently began its second season on Showtime.
House of Games, a 1987 movie about con artists, was written and directed by David Mamet (in his directorial debut), and stars Joe Mantegna and Lindsay Crouse.
Boku! “BOKU enables people across the globe to pay for the things they love using the one device they’re never without.” Phonetic spelling of French beaucoup (much, a lot). Based in San Francisco, with offices in London, Berlin, and Singapore.
Loku! “At Loku, we have built the first-of-it’s-kind [sic] local analytics technology that gathers and synthesizes local information from the web & social media.” Possibly from “location” plus “you.” Based in Berkeley.
Zoku! “Zoku is dedicated to providing unique products for the home. We are a collective of creative individuals who create things that will make our lives better through intelligent design and engineering.” No name story provided, but zoku means “tribe,” “clan,” or “family” in Japanese. Based in Hoboken.
Roku! “Roku launched the first product designed to deliver movies from Netflix instantly on TV, using the power of the Internet.” Based in San Francisco. Roku is the Japanese word for “six”; more about Roku here.
I don’t get the appeal of My Little Pony even on a meta-meta-ironic level, but I am not you, and you, for all I know, may be a brony. In that case, knock yourself out with Ponify, a browser extension “which uses intelligent case-adaptive technologies to replace non-pony related words with ones that are pony-related” – hand into hoof, for example.
Then there’s Nüdifier, which is a twofer name: nominalized -ify suffix andgratuitous umlaut! The app lets you select an area of a photo for pixelated fake-nudity censorship.
Two new names—Kinnek and Kngine—are bringing back old memories.
The names are more similar than they appear. That’s because – surprise! – Kngine is meant to be pronounced “kin-gin.” Yes, “kin-gin,” despite the fact that (1) Kngine is meant to be a compression of “knowledge engine” and (2) in English, K before N is always, always, always silent.*
But language appears not to be the strong suit of the Kngine team—which is odd, since Kngine is billed as a natural-language app.
“Links are not answer”?
Copy is not answer, either. This line appears in large type and unpunctuated:
With its simple interface and brilliant engine your life will be smarter
My life has a rather complicated interface, actually. But I digress.
So what we have are two more names that begin with kin, just like—here comes the nostalgia—Kindle (Amazon’s e-book reader), KIN (Microsoft’s ill-starred mobile phone), and Kinect (Microsoft’s Xbox 360 peripheral).
Some of you may also remember Kinetic, a fitness game made by Nike for the Sony EyeToy.
New York-based Kinnek calls itself “a better way to manage your business purchases”; Silicon Valley-based Kngine says it’s “changing the way people create, acquire and consume Knowledge [capital K sic].”
The companies may be brilliantly innovative—it’s too early to tell—but they haven’t signaled it with their names, which are derivative (Kinnek) and forced (Kngine).
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* In Yiddish you’d pronounce the K. Compare knaidlach (matzoh balls), pronounced with a kuh and a nay.
