Name Changers, Part 2

More stories from the Recent Name Change file:

In the beginning there was TweetPhoto, founded in 2009 to allow users of Twitter and other social-media platforms to share photos. In August 2010 TweetPhoto became Plixi and added a geolocation focus to the service. And on May 1 Plixi will change its name again—to Lockerz Photos , to show its kinship with Lockerz, the social-commerce network that acquired Plixi in January.

Congratulations to all concerned, but really: “Lockerz”? Enough with the hip-hop Z-plural, which was already looking dated in 1999, when Fox launched the Boyz Channel and the Girlz Channel—and when Lockerz’s target market of 13- to 30-year-olds was barely sentient. Even worse, Lockerz awards its users something called Pointz—it prefers that you call them PTZ—which can be exchanged for discounts or direct purchases. PTZ: it’s just a vowel away from “putz.” (Hat tip: Trochee.)

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Texas-based Seeing Interactive, which launched in January 2010 after three years in development, changed its name last month to OwnLocal. In addition to its original mission—helping newspapers take ad dollars away from the Yellow Pages—the company has added a daily-deals feature. Like Groupon, yes, but for “markets that haven’t even heard of Groupon,” according to CEO Lloyd Armbrust. “Seeing Interactive” was a less-than-optimal name for this combination of services. OwnLocal is an improvement, but not just because it’s shorter: interactive was boring and overly technical, and what does seeing have to do with ad revenue? OwnLocal, by contrast, contains the keyword local, communicates ownership, and incorporates assonance (vowel rhyme) to make the name more memorable and fun to say.

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Here’s a cautionary tale about names, language, and slang.

PinkelStar founder Alexander van Elsas had a great story to tell investors and customers: his company name was a blend of the color pink and Elstar, a Dutch apple variety. The –star suffix could be transformed into a versatile graphic element.

Founded in July 2010, PinkelStar (the S is lower-case in the logo but upper-case everywhere else), which provides tools for developers of mobile apps, got off to an encouraging start, with a $500,000 funding round and coverage by VentureBeat and TechCrunch. I’ll let van Elsas take it from there:

And then it all happened. After a TechCrunch post someone made an smart remark about our company name. Were we aware that ‘pinkeln’ actually means ‘to pee’ in German, and that we effectively managed to call our company ‘Peeing star’? WTF?

Our company is based in Amsterdam, Germany is our neighboring country. But none of us realized what PinkelStar translated to in German. We were hoping that developers would pick up on the benefits of our service. Instead that one comment lead [sic] to an entire new discussion.

The comment got picked up by ‘a few’ German Twitter users, and a ‘peeing’ storm was born.

Long story short: van Elsas and his team went back to the drawing board and emerged with a new name for the consumer service, Zwapp, and a related name for the developer platform, Zwapp Connect.

 

 

I’d have liked van Elsas to explain name choice. Is it as meaningless in Dutch (or German) as it is in English? Is it meant to suggest “zap”? Since the website and blog are in English, are we meant to give the name an English pronunciation, or is the W pronounced like V?

In any case, it’s an interesting choice with some positive non-urinary associations. I wish the company well. And I wish all startups would seek the counsel of professional name developers with strong linguistic skills before they make costly and energy-sapping mistakes. (Hat tip: @CalliopeCo.)

Comments

[Lane]

I can't resist the urge to advertise this, my 10-yr-old son's YouTube video on "The problem with z", complaining about what Nancy calls the "hip-hop z", inspired by Mighty Beanz, a collectible toy he's into...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBfvRxoEPYg

Nancy, maybe you can give him a job one day.

[Q. Pheevr]

As far as I know, Zwapp is meaningless in Dutch; I would assume that it's intended to evoke swap, zap, and app. The closest Dutch words to it that I'm aware of are zwak ('weak'), zwabber ('mop'), and wapperen ('to blow [in the wind, like a flag]'), but since I'm not actually a Dutch speaker, I have no idea to what extent Zwapp might actually call any of these to mind. The letter "w" in Dutch represents a labiodental approximant /ʋ/ that could be informally described as sounding like something halfway between /w/ and /v/; in English, I'd definitely pronounce the name with a /w/.

[Yods]

It rather reminds me of the word of the year of 3? years ago - zwaffelen, meaning to slap with a flacid penis. Seriously.

[Nancy Friedman]

@Yods: Actually, that word was "swaffelen." It was the Dutch word of the year in 2008.
http://www.expatica.com/nl/news/local_news/Dutch-word-of-the-year-is-swaffelen.html

[Duchesse]

Reading this with a packet of Starbucks Tazo tea next to me, I suddenly wondered... why? When pronounced with a long a, it evokes "taser", and with a a short a, like "tassel", nothing tea-or even beverage-like about it. Look what you have wrought.

[Lauren]

Hi Nancy,

I wonder if the current 'z' plural trend is less to do with hip hop culture and more to do with 'gamespeek' language trends like lolcats (http://icanhascheezburger.com/) where there is a) a tendency of pluralise almost all nouns and b) a consistent pattern of phonetically representative orthography by writing voiced 'z' forms in the appropriate environment.

By the way, I stumbled on your site through the link from The Economist and am now a happy RSScriber.

[Nancy Friedman]

@Duchesse: Look for an upcoming post about the origin of Tazo. For now, I'll merely mention that "taza" is Spanish for "cup" and long-A "Tazo" suggests the French word for tea, "thé."

[Nancy Friedman]

@Lauren: Gamespeek may play a role, but it's following the trend, not leading it. The R&B/hiphop group Boyz II Men was formed in 1989; the film "Boyz N the Hood" was released in 1991. In her book "Slam Dunks and No-Brainers," cultural critic Leslie Savan traces the use deliberate Z-misspellings back to the 1920s, when young people spelled "rats" as "rhatz." See my October 2006 post, "Oh Say, Can You Zee?", for more on this subject: http://nancyfriedman.typepad.com/away_with_words/2006/10/oh_say_can_you_.html