Dealing with Company and Product Identity: Terbium Labs Nails It
July 11, 2015
Navigate to www.terbiumlabs.com and read about the company.
Nifty name. Very nifty name indeed. Now, a bit of branding commentary.
I used to work at Halliburton Nuclear. Ah, the good old days of nuclear engineers poking fun at civil engineers and mathematicians not understanding any joke made my the computer engineers.
The problem of naming companies in high technology disciplines is a very big one. Before Halliburton gobbled up the Nuclear Utility Services outfit, the company with more than 400 nuclear engineers on staff struggled with its name. Nuclear Utility Services was abbreviated to NUS. A pretty sharp copywriter named Richard Harrington of the dearly loved Ketchum, McLeod and Gove ad agency came up with this catchy line:
After the EPA, call NUS.
The important point is that Mr. Harrington, a whiz person, wanted to have people read each letter: E-P-A, not say eepa and say N-U-S not say noose. In Japanese, the sound “nus” has a negative meaning usually applied to pressurized body odor emissions. Not good.
Search and content processing vendors struggle with names. I have written about outfits which have fumbled the branding ball. Examples range from Thunderstone which has been usurped by a gaming company. Brainware which has been snagged and used for interesting videos. Smartlogic whose name has been appropriated by a smaller outfit doing marketing/design stuff. There are names which are impossible to find; for example, i2, AMI, and ChaCha to name a few among many.
I want to call attention to a quite useful product naming which I learned about recently. Navigate to TerbiumLabs.com. Consider the word Terbium. Look for the word “Matchlight.”
I find Terbium a darned good word because terbium is an element, which my old (and I mean old) chemistry professor pronounced “ter-beem”). The element has a number of useful applications. Think solid sate devices and as a magic ingredient in some rocket fuels and—okay, okay—some explosives.
But as good as “terbium” is for a company I absolutely delight in this product name:
Matchlight.
Now what’s Matchlight and why should anyone care. My hunch is that the technology which allows a next generation approach to content identification and other functions works to
- light a match in the wilderness
- illuminate a dark space
- start a camp fire so I can cook a goose
You can and should learn more about Terbium Labs and its technology. The names will help you remember.
Important company; important technology. Great name Matchlight. (Hear that search and content processing vendors with dud names?)
Stephen E Arnold, July 11, 2015
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