Fritinancy

Facebook's Meta-morphosis

After teasing us for months with talk of a corporate name change and of a “metaverse” that will bring physically distant people closer together, Facebook sent shock waves around the world by …

Just kidding, folks! Facebook founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg shocked precisely no one who was following the company’s October 28 Connect conference. Instead, his company did what it always does: something predictable, clunky, and imitative. It’s staking a claim in the “metaverse”; ergo, the new corporate name is Meta. (Product names, including the Facebook social-media platform, remain unchanged.) From the new About page: “The metaverse is the next evolution of social connection. Our company’s vision is to help bring the metaverse to life, so we are changing our name to reflect our commitment to this future.”

If you think you’ve seen logos like this one before, you’re right. Read James I. Bowie’s analysis of how the Airbnb “loop” logo, introduced in 2016 to general disdain, has triumphed in the design world.

 

Name review: Five new(ish) tech companies

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these roundups, hasn’t it? Let’s take a look at some names making headlines in the tech world. In alphabetical order:

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Name in the news: Bellingcat

“It is not a war on Russian TV,” Stanislav Kucher, a Russian television host, told the New York Times in an article published March 8, 2022. “You will not see explosions, you will not see strikes on neighborhoods where civilians live, you will not see a lot in terms of troops, soldiers, heavy armored vehicles or anything like that.”

How to debunk—or even prebunk—Russia’s propaganda and disinformation? One answer is the work done by an open-source intelligence (OSINT) organization called Bellingcat. Founded by British journalist/blogger Eliot Higgins in 2014 and headquartered in the Netherlands, Bellingcat has researchers in more than 70 countries; it uses “publicly available data and citizen journalist analysis” to advance  “narratives of conflict, crime, and human rights abuses.” Geolocation tags, radar data, and satellite images are among the tools that Bellingcat researchers have employed in investigations from Syria to Yemen to Eastern Europe.

Bellingcat’s elegant wordmark

 

You can learn more about Bellingcat from its excellent website and Twitter feed; from a March 2021 interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air”; from a February 27, 2022, CBC story about Russian disinformation,; from a February 1, 2022, PBS interview with Eliot Higgins; and from a March 8, 2022, story in the Atlantic headlined “The Information War Isn’t Over Yet.” Higgins has also published a book, We Are Belllingcat (2021); when The Guardian reviewed it in February 2021, it called the book “a manifesto for optimism in a dark age”:

It argues that “cyber-miserabilism” – the doomy belief that big tech and bad actors have permanently screwed our democracy – is wrong. Instead, Higgins hails the internet as an “extraordinary gift”. In his view, facts still matter, accountability is possible, and people still care about the difference between truth and lies.

(I wrote about “miserabilism” in 2016. “Cyber-miserabilism” is a nice new twist.)

My focus here, however, is the Bellingcat name, which I’ve admired for years. I' regret only that it took Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to prompt me to finally write about it.

In the news: Metamates and Amazonification

How are the 1,500-pound gorillas of commerce doing these days? Let’s rattle some Facebook and Amazon cages and find out!

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Name in the news: Block

Its best-known brand is Square, the payment app that launched in 2009 and whose fortunes soared during the 2020 pandemic as more retailers began accepting cashless payments. But as of December 10 the parent company—whose holdings also include the streaming-music service Tidal and the mysteriously named open developer platform TBD54566975*—will be known as Block. Like Facebook’s Meta and Google’s Alphabet, this is a corporate name change that will not directly affect consumers.

Block’s shape-shifting logo, an oddly shaped cube.

 

CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey, 45, a cryptocurrency enthusiast, had stepped down from his role as Twitter CEO on November 29.

Block will keep the ticker symbol SQ; its URL is block.xyz.

From the Twitter announcement:

Name in the news: Puck

One of the newest media outlets in the US has a very old name: Puck.

The digital publication, which launched in September, is owned and operated by a group of veteran New York journalists (Julia Ioffe, Barathunde Thurston, Jon Kelly, Matt Belloni, and others) and promotes itself as “a new media company dedicated to the power corridors of our culture: Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood” and as “a platform for smart, engaging (and, yes, occasionally dishy) journalism.” Its beats are Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Washington.

A pre-launch announcement from Puck.news.

 

You can read one article without paying, but if you want more dish you’ll have to dish out some cash. “A $100 annual fee entitles subscribers to personal emails from the authors and all the newsletters, features and breaking news; moving up to $250 brings all that plus access to conference calls with the authors, Q&As with the staff and invitations to events,” Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw reported on September 13.

What about the name? From the August 5, 2021, email announcement: “The name is a nod to Shakespeare—as well as to the building where humor magazine Spy was born.”

More about Spy in a bit. First, though, here’s the Puck Building.

Name in the news: Shein

Here’s a statistic that surprised even me, a follower of fashion and retail trends: The most downloaded shopping app in the U.S. in May 2021 was not Amazon. It was Shein, an online-only retailer of cheap fast fashion for women and men (plus beauty products, plus home products) founded in 2008 in Nanjing, China, by Chris Xu, a search-engine-optimization specialist with no previous experience in fashion or retail.

Today, Shein (often styled as SHEIN) is a “quindecacorn”*—its gross merchandise volume is worth US$15 billion—and it’s forecast to surpass $20 billion in volume by the end of 2021. The word “juggernaut” comes up frequently in coverage of the company, which has achieved its numbers by targeting the mostly female tween, teen, and early-20s members of Generation Z who can’t resist buying tops and dresses for as little as $5 (and posting about their “hauls” on social media) and who eagerly anticipate Shein’s monthly roster of designer collaborations.

Still from a Shein “haul video” posted in December 2020 by Instagrammer Fabienne Pelaud, who struggles with the pronunciation of “Shein.”

 

Word of the week: Mjolnir

The pharmaceutical company Merck announced on October 1 that its new oral antiviral medication reduced by about 50 percent the risk of hospitalization and death in people with mild or moderate cases of COVID-19, and that it would seek emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for its use in the US.

The new drug’s generic name: molnupiravir.

Multisyllabic pharmaceutical names are of course nothing new. What’s unusual is molnupiravir’s origin, and the fact that Merck has publicly discussed the naming story.

Dean Li, Merck’s head of research and development, told the medical publication Stat News:

“Our prediction from our in vitro studies and now with this data is that molnupiravir is named after the right — you know, it’s named after Thor’s hammer [Mjollnir], this is a hammer against SARS-CoV-2 regardless of the variant.”

“The mighty Thor cannot reach his enchanged hammer! Is this to be Loki’s final victory???”: Marvel Comics

Name in the news: Comirnaty

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today granted full approval to the COVID-19 vaccine manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech. The vaccine, which will be marketed as Comirnaty (generic name tozinameran), had been administered under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) since December 11, 2020; more than 200 million doses have been administered in the U.S. since that date.

The Comirnaty name didn’t just appear out of the blue today. I mentioned it in a May 2021 column on vaccination terminology and vaccine names. And Fierce Pharma reported on it back in December 2020, interviewing Scott Piergrossi, president of operations and communications at Brand Institute, the pharma-naming agency that developed the name for Pfizer-BioNTech. “The name is coined from Covid-19 immunity, and then embeds the mRNA in the middle, which is the platform technology, and as a whole the name is meant to evoke the word community,” Piergrossi told Fierce Pharma:

Name in the news: Phexxi

A new birth-control product, Phexxi, was the subject of a long story in the New York Times Styles section on June 10. “The pill helped start the sexual revolution,” reads the headline. “What will Phexxi do?”

What is Phexxi? According to the product website, Phexxi is a nonhormonal vaginal gel that “works to prevent pregnancy by altering the pH of your vagina, which is different from hormonal birth control.” Its primary ingredients are lactic acid, citric acid, and potassium bitartrate (the last ingredient is better known, at least to cooks, as “cream of tartar”). In May 2020, Phexxi filed for trademark protection and received FDA approval; the product went on sale in the US in September 2020. An ad campaign—notably a 60-second video that urges women to “get past your compromises and get Phexxi”—launched in early February 2021.

Screen grab from the 60-second ad

Does Phexxi work? Its parent company, Evofem Biosciences (“Science with a Soul”), says that in clinical trials “with perfect use,” the gel is 93 percent effective in preventing pregnancy. As for the Phexxi name—well, let’s talk about it.

Name in the news: Kyndryl

Before I click on “Bad Names” as a blog-post category, I pause to reflect. Am I rushing to judgment, neglecting to account for the Zajonc effect, which tells us that repeated exposure to a name will soften an initially harsh reaction, and that we’ll eventually learn to love, or at least not hate, a name like Bonvoy? Am I mistaking my personal associations—what I like to call the “But That’s a Car Name!” response—for an objective evaluation? Am I punching down, sneering at a struggling little company’s attempt to sound smart or fancy?

Or do we in fact have a legitimate, inexcusable stinker on our hands—a tronc, a Mondelēz, a Nyoombl?

All of this was on my mind when I decided to write about Kyndryl—that’s Kyndryl, not Kindle—which is the name of IBM’s $19 billion managed-infrastructure spinoff. The name was announced on April 12; the creation of the new public company, to be headquartered in New York, will become final in late 2021.

 

Infrastructure-ish graphic via IBM.com