Fritinancy

Apostro-faux

Editrix wrote a very intriguing post about a Silicon Valley startup that's developing "comment-correcting software" called apostrophree. The lower-case a, she said, is intentional. What a boon: automatic correction of their/there/they're, affect/effect, and missing or misplaced apostrophes (whence the software's name). Who doesn't want that?

The full story is over at Typical Programmer, in the form of an interview between TP (Portland, OR, computer guy Greg Jorgensen) and apostrophree's founder, a person called "John Scogan." My quotation marks are intentional, too, because there is apparently no such person--and, sorry to disappoint--no such software.

The tip-off is in the first sentence:

In a little-noticed deal that closed yesterday the Silicon Valley startup apostrophree secured a $25 million first round with Bolus Venture Capital of Palo Alto. apostrophree received seed money from Paul Graham’s Y Combinator earlier this year.

A Google search confirms that there's no Bolus Venture Capital in Palo Alto or anywhere else, but I didn't need Google to tell me that bolus is part of the joke: it means, variously, "a mass of chewed food," "a vaginal or rectal suppository," or "a single dose of a drug." But it does sound VC-ish.

There's also no apostrophree--in fact, if you fancy the domain name (which I concede is darned clever), it's available right now, with one or two e's.

What makes it such an effective hoax is that Typical Programmer is a generally dead-serious blog about dead-serious programming issues. Which explains why so many earnest commenters were taken in ("At least once in a while, the system must produce false positives: correcting ‘errors’ that do not exist, or correcting things in an incorrect way").

I can't resist quoting from the "Scogan interview":

But how does apostrophree save time? Don’t people just read through bad spelling and ignore missing apostrophes?
Most people either don’t recognize or don’t care when they encounter a misspelled word or incorrectly-formed plural. But some people do notice, and there’s a personality type that will spend a lot of time demonstrating their superior English skills online. We’ve studied this for over a year, in many settings, and over and over we find the same thing: the most expensive employees, especially technical people such as programmers, can be provoked by the smallest error to post a comment of their own correcting the error and chastising the original poster. Observing technical staff in one organization we found that just two common errors — it’s instead of its and there instead of their — accounted for six hours of essentially wasted time per month per employee.

At least one element of this parody is 100 percent accurate: the bit about the "personality type that will spend a lot of time demonstrating their superior English skills online."

Just saying.

Of course, even hoax startups have business plans:

How do you plan to grow apostrophree so you can sell upgrades and keep money coming in?
We’re working on some things now, like cliché removal, that look promising. We have a team in the U.K. working on changing passive voice to active. Even something as simple as correcting capitalization of technical words and acronyms can pay off. If one of your expensive programmers comes across PERL instead of Perl he can spend thirty to forty-five minutes posting a correction, including extracts from two or three Wikipedia articles and Usenet archives. That’s ten to fifteen minutes per uncapitalized letter. And your programmer will compose and post a new version of the correction every time PERL is encountered online. That’s more than five times as long as is typically spent correcting presently when currently was meant.

By the way, this is Typical Programmer's second interview with a programmer "working on interesting projects and pushing new ideas and technologies." The first, posted on July 28, was with Boyd Hakluyt (um, pronounced hack-light?), who is working on "a new web application framework called Miasma." I especially enjoyed this:

What was it called before you renamed it Miasma?
Originally it was called Darlene. One of our lead developers, who wrote the core URL routing code and the template parser named the first version after his girlfriend. When they broke up we talked about renaming it couldn’t settle on a good name that wasn’t taken. When he left the project Darlene didn’t seem to fit anymore. I think Miasma is cool name and no other programming project is using that name. I have a friend working on a logo, too.

How many people are working on Miasma?
Right now it’s just me, but I’m working on it almost every day.

I love "almost every day."

Jorgensen even includes some code snippets, which are probably just as hilarious as the "interview transcript," but I haven't a clue.

Here's the actual Miasma.com, a nice blog by a San Francisco gal. And here, for your further edification, is BBC World Service Digital Planet contributor Bill Thompson on "miasma computing" (hat tip: Nick Carr):

It is often useful to conceptualise online activities as cyberspace, the place behind the screen, but the internet is firmly of the real world, and that is one of the greatest problems facing cloud computing today.

In the real world national borders, commercial rivalries and political imperatives all come into play, turning the cloud into a miasma as heavy with menace as the fog over the Grimpen Mire that concealed the Hound of the Baskervilles in Arthur Conan Doyle's story.

Update: From the comments thread on this Metafilter post about "Apostrophee": Seems that John Scogan was a jester in the court of King Edward IV. He was "an Oxford scholar" who "loved practical jokes."

Medic!

The name doctor is in, dispensing instant diagnoses of medico-pharmaceutical nomenclature.

I have a hunch Intuitive Surgical does not inspire a great deal of confidence in you--it didn't in me. It's just this little thing I have: when I'm being cut open, I want the cutter to be guided by something a bit more informed than gut instinct. Besides, the juxtaposition of "intuitive" and "surgical" makes me think of those quack docs in the Philippines who perform "psychic surgery" with their bare hands. Of course, that's not what Intuitive Surgical does: in fact, oddly enough, it's a robotics company. So I'm not clear where the intuition is coming from, unless these particular robots have aced the Turing Test.

Got chlamydia? If you're in the UK, later this year you'll be able to treat the infection with a new over-the-counter drug--actually an old drug, azithromycin, newly approved for OTC sale. Its name? Clamelle. Trademark lawyer Jessica Stone Levy, who spotted the news story, commented in an e-mail: "How can a mark begin with clam and not evoke clammy? I'm sorry, it just sounds like something on an Saturday Night Live skit."

Or a weird name for a baby girl. Or something you'd wash down with Clamato. But it's worse than that. Not only is "clam" one of those intrinsically funny-sounding words (that comic "K" at the beginning?) but it's also a slang term for vagina. Which of course is one of the primary parts affected by chlamydia. (It's also U.S. slang for "one dollar.")

Even if I could get beyond all those negative associations, there's another problem: In U.S. pharmaceutical naming, at least, there's an unwritten proscription against mentioning the name of the disease in the name of the cure. Instead, we accentuate the positive. So the treatment for symptoms of enlarged prostate is Flomax, not TrickleX; if you have stomach ulcers you might take Zantac but never Burnesta.

Clamelle: bad medicine no matter how you look at it. And now I'll clam up.

Haiku Contest Winner and Week 2 Rules

Congratulations to Kevin C. McMarvin, the first winner of the Samsung-CrunchGear "Use Your Instinct" haiku contest. The rules specified that the poem involve the sense of hearing; Kevin won a Samsung M520 for this three-liner:

I can almost hear
the sound of packaging tape
as I win your phone

This week's theme: the sense of sight. Use Twitter to send your entry to @useyourinstinct. The prize is a Samsung Ace; entries close at noon July 22.

Write a Haiku, Win a Phone

At last, a technology contest for poetry geeks!

The scoop: CrunchGear is giving away a Samsung phone every week to the winner of an online haiku contest. This week's prize is an M520; the final prize will be the new Web-enabled Instinct model.

The catch: you must post your haiku on Twitter, addressed to @useyourinstinct. If you're not already among the Twitterati, simply go to Twitter and create a login. (It's free.) While you're there, look me up--I'm Fritinancy--and follow my tweets. Or not.

The rules: You already know that a haiku is a three-line Japanese verse form with the following structure: five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables. This week's additional rule: your subject must be the sense of hearing. CrunchGear admonishes us to keep it clean, creative, and clever. Funny is good, too.

Enter as often as you like, but you can win only one prize.

Read all about it here.

Full disclosure: I have nothing to disclose. I have no connection whatsoever to Samsung; I didn't name the Instinct or any other phone. (I had to check to see what kind of phone I actually own. Oh. It's a Sanyo.)

I did, however, win a haiku contest in eleventh-grade English class. Watch your back, grasshopper.

Word of the Week: Crufty

Crufty: Badly designed, redundant, or obsolete; used to describe computer programs and devices.

According to David English's dictionary of computer jargon, the noun and verb forms ("cruft") were backformed from the adjective. The word may be a play on "craft" (as in "hand-crufted for your computing pleasure"). Or maybe not, English writes:

This term is one of the oldest in the jargon and no one is sure of its etymology, but it is suggestive that there is a Cruft Hall at Harvard University which is part of the old physics building; it’s said to have been the physics department's radar lab during WWII. To this day (early 1993) the windows appear to be full of random techno-junk. MIT or Lincoln Labs people may well have coined the term as a knock on the competition.

In her own online jargon dictionary, Jennifer Nine proposes an additional meaning for the noun form of "cruft":

5. [University of Wisconsin] n. Cruft is to hackers as gaggle is to
geese; that is, at UW one properly says "a cruft of hackers".

The jargon term "cruft" is not to be confused with Crufts, an international dog show held every March in Birmingham, England.

Photo of Harvard Cruft Hall by Brett Stilwell.

Word of the Week: Lobbycon

Lobbycon (verb): To mingle in the lobby of a technology-conference venue, often without paying the conference fee, for the purpose of making professional connections. Lobbyconners don't crash sessions or parties, which would be illegal; instead, they simply loiter and shmooze in public areas.

A page-one story by Verne Kopytoff in the San Francisco Chronicle describes the phenomenon:

By most accounts, the fourth annual Web 2.0 Summit, a three-day Internet conference that features eBay CEO Meg Whitman and News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, is the pinnacle of lobbycon. A combination of $3,595 invitations, a sold-out venue and A-list attendees always draws a big contingent of people who just want to work the hallways.

No doubt the Palace Hotel, where Web 2.0 is held, offers a cozy place to chat up venture capitalists with a few million dollars to invest, or advertisers with money to burn. Dealmakers, and those who want to be, stand elbow-to-elbow outside the Grand Ballroom in a hallway appointed with marble floors, crystal chandeliers and comfortable chairs.

Kopytoff writes that lobbycon "is inspired by the lingo of conference names, the titles of which sometimes end with 'con'."

Use of lobbycon dates back at least to mid-2004, when Metroblogging co-founder Sean Bonner wrote a post after attending the BlogOn conference in Berkeley:

I think the real value of these events is getting the right people together. Earlier this year at e-tech we were joking that there were two conferences going on, e-tech was upstairs and lobbycon was downstairs. ... So I'm proposing this - let's actually do it and see what happens. We'll pick a hotel in some city with a big lobby with wifi access and a date, and that's it. No panels, no time limits, no structure, no sponsors trying to push their products. Just the people and the lobby. We'll publish the list of attendees as soon as they sign up and that will be the conference.

More about the Web 2.0 Summit, which opens Oct. 17, here.

The Goofy-Names Index

Is the latest technology bubble about to burst?  A page-one article in today's Wall Street Journal reports on several indicators of a downward trend:

The goofy-names index, for example, is back near its previous high. Consider Orgoo Inc., which helps people organize all their Web communications. Or Zipidee Inc., a purveyor of "digital goods" such as cellphone ring tones. "Are these names of dogs or are they names of companies?" asks Kate Mitchell, a venture capitalist in Foster City, Calif.

After the jump, reporters Rebecca Buckman and Kevin J. Delaney mention another newish tech company "whose moniker might qualify for the goofy-name index": Obopay.

Ouch! This isn't business--it's personal. And also business. My naming company, Wordworking, worked with Obopay's founders in 2005 to come up with a name to replace "Ultralight FS" for the mobile-payment service they'd developed. Because the initial market for the service was U.S. college students, the founders wanted a name that sounded "cool" and "fun." (For legal reasons, it couldn't sound like "banking"--even though the premise of the service was that you'd use your cell phone as a portable banking account.)

As the WSJ article accurately reports (Ms. Buckman interviewed me on the phone), the "Obo-" portion of Obopay came from obol, an ancient Greek coin. OBO is also shorthand for "or best offer," which suggests financial transcations.  Those stories piqued the founders' interest. But what really made them happy was that Obopay was fun and easy to say. And it definitely didn't hurt that Obopay.com was available. So while other contenders such as CellWorth or Cashify might have been more straightforward, they wouldn't have had the equivalent emotional appeal to college students.

Is Obopay "goofy"? Maybe a little. But it's also serious enough, and international-sounding enough, to attract customers and investors--not just on college campuses but, eventually, among "underbanked" populations in Africa and other areas of the world where cell phones greatly outnumber ATMs. Which is where the idea for Obopay was born.

The defense rests.

Twick or Tweet

Some of the most perceptive writing in the blogosphere--or between hard covers, for that matter--comes from the keyboard of Nick Carr, author of Does IT Matter? and of the Rough Type blog. Here he weighs in on Twitter, which he calls "the telegraph of Narcissus":

Like so many other Web 2.0 services, Twitter wraps itself and its users in an infantile language. We're not adults having conversations, or even people sending messages. We're tweeters twittering tweets. We're twitters tweetering twits. We're twits tweeting twitters. We're Tweety Birds.

I did! I did taw a puddy tat! [half a minute ago]

I tawt I taw a puddy tat! [1 minute ago]

Narcissism is just the user interface for nihilism, of course, and with artfully kitschy services like Twitter we're allowed to both indulge our self-absorption and distance ourselves from it by acknowledging, with a coy digital wink, its essential emptiness. I love me! Just kidding!

The great paradox of "social networking" is that it uses narcissism as the glue for "community." Being online means being alone, and being in an online community means being alone together. The community is purely symbolic, a pixellated simulation conjured up by software to feed the modern self's bottomless hunger. Hunger for what? For verification of its existence? No, not even that. For verification that it has a role to play.

Read my own take on Twitter.

New Name Beat: Knuru

I learned about this month's New Name through Knowledge @ Wharton, a monthly e-newsletter from the University of Pennsylvania's business school.

What it is: Knuru is a new natural-language search engine for business information; Knowledge @ Wharton is its first major partner. "Natural language" simply means that instead of typing keywords into the search field, you type sentences: "What's happening with subprime mortgages?" or "Is Alan Greenspan still alive?" The service is free; results are presented in contextualized summaries from reputable business sources. From knuru.com's About page: "Unlike traditional search engines, knuru [sic] is not concerned with endless indexing of web pages and a never-ending convoluting of page rankings, paid rankings or any other artificial juxtapositioning [sic] of search results based on who pays most. Nor will we serve misleading paid-for search result rankings, which is common with other search technologies."

Where it comes from: Knuru's parent company is London-based Xexco, which founder Dennis Oudejans told me is pronounced "Exco." He added that he acquired "Xexco" when he acquired the company, and he's changing it to Knuru, and we're all thankful for that. (I believe Xexco is Klingon for "What were they thinking?")

What they're saying: Not much--yet. Knuru is still in beta. Microsoft Office users can access it (via a downloadable application) via the Research button; according to 44 voters in a Microsoft Office forum, Knuru earned five out of a possible five stars.

What it means: Dennis Oudejans told me in an email that the company had invited "five or six" naming agencies to bid on the naming project and eventually involved two--an unusual but not unprecedented decision. "One agency had an analytical/scientific approach, whereas the other seemed more unstructured and creative," Oudejans said. The analytical/scientific agency helped the company define its core values: agility, authority, and accuracy. Then the company tossed out all the names developed by the two agencies in favor of its own coinage, a blend of knowledge and guru. "Knuru" has meaning in at least one South Indian language, Tamil, although I was unable to discern from context what that meaning is. Pavala Knuru means "Coral Hill," a landmark near Arunachaleshwar Temple in Tiruvannamalai District, in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. I also discovered a saying in the Tetun language of East Timor: “bikan ho knuru mak baku malu” (as fork and spoon that always touch each other).

What I like: Knuru is short and unusual, and the partnership with Knowledge @ Wharton helps reinforce the "kn = knowledge" connection. The company was smart to register the name with at least three domain extensions domain: .com, .net, and .org. (Many startups fail to take this inexpensive precautionary step and leave themselves open to domain encroachment.)

What I'd worry about: Right off the bat I stumbled over Knuru's pronunciation. English has many words with silent k--know, knife, knock, knuckle. But the dropped k isn't intuitive, because at one time in the language's history (at least until the fourteenth century), the k was sounded in all those words, as it is in the German from which they came. English has also adopted a number of Yiddish words--knish, knaidlach, k'nocker--in which, as in German, the k is hard. (K'nocker is unrelated to the British slang term knackered, in which the k is silent.) And then there's Knut (German) or Knute (Scandinavian), names pronounced with a hard k that are just familiar enough to English speakers to invite confusion. (The English form makes the pronunciation explicit: Canute, which means "white haired.")

All of which explains why I want to pronounce knuru like k'nuru. I'd have no such problem with a silent-g coinage: even though the gn- and kn- stems are equivalent--they both mean "know"--I'm not tempted to pronounce the g. Knuru confuses because it looks too foreign to send the message "follow the common English-pronunciation rules."

Here's a separate problem: I'm not convinced that beginning this name with a silent letter tells the right story for this company, which should be positioning itself as an outspoken--not reticent--knowledge source.

But the biggest problem with Knuru is that, despite its odd look, it's a descriptive rather than a metaphorical name: it tells "who we are" (a knowledge guru) rather than "how your life will be better." Compare, for example, the name of another new natural-language search engine, Powerset--a term borrowed from the language of mathematics and invigorated by an expanded new context (and a great logo). No ambiguous pronunciation or forced word-blend; just the promise of power and being set to do what you want. Very effective. (Thanks to Laurie Clemans for the Powerset update.)

The decision: On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being "eh" and 5 being "yesss!", I'd give Knuru 3.1. This is a naming decision guided too much by strict etymology (remember: etymology doesn't matter; associations do), domain availability, and programmers' rules ("knowledge plus guru equals knuru") and not enough by common sense ("Will everyone be able to pronounce this word and figure out what it means?") and metaphor. Unfortunately, it's the sort of solution that emerges all too frequently when companies--especially technology companies--name themselves.

But: Knuru may be able to overcome the liabilities of its name with a strong branding message ("We're the knowledge gurus") and some pronunciation guides ("Knuru ... as in know-how"). As they themselves proclaim to their users, context is everything.

From the Company Whose Name Means "Small" and "Flaccid"

How products get named at Microsoft. (Via Mike Pope.)

How packaging gets designed at Microsoft.