Trademarks 2.0
A bit more than a decade ago, eNames were popular choices for products and services. It was cool to call your new company eSomething. Maybe it was inspired by email which had achieved near-ubiquitous adoption at that point. Quite a few of the eCompanies also experimented with slipping the @-character into their product names. Before the eNames, InterCapping (or bi-capitalisation or CamelCase) was all the rage. There was also a longish period when it was popular to append "2000" to various names, but the fad expired as the millennium approached.
Following the eNames we had iNames. Popularised by Apple as something to do with the internet and good user interfaces, iNames even made it into cars.
Presently, we are experiencing a wave of trade names with the "2.0" suffix, indicating that something has been thought through, restructured and released as a new version. Popularised by the magazine Business 2.0, the earliest US trademark I can find with the 2.0 suffix is Joker 2.0, a name for cigarette paper registered as a trademark in 1986.
A search at the US Patent and Trademark Office tells us that there are currently 60 live registered or applied for trademarks sporting "2.0". In the list of results are the frequently mentioned Web 2.0 (coined by Tim O'Reilly and registered as a service mark by CMP Media) and Enterprise 2.0 (a trademark applied for by Alvin K. Chang in May 2006).
The list also includes some interesting combinations that are less well known. Among the registered trademarks we find Dialtone 2.0 and You 2.0. Trademarks applied for include Real Estate 2.0, Health Care 2.0, Identity 2.0, Management 2.0, Office 2.0, Music Video 2.0 and Advertising 2.0. A sign of industries to be re-invented? It is already happening.
Law firm Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue have registered Jones Day 2.0 as a trademark. They use it to market their technology practice (PDF), stating that "technology and the internet have changed our business as much as yours."
In the list, I also noticed that somebody has registered Jumbo Jet 2.0 as a trademark (not Airbus though), and that Ottoman 2.0 is a registered trademark for a foot massage device.
"Trademarks 2.0" will, except for a few instances, end without stretching to 2.1 or 3.0. What trade names should we expect next? Different alphabets, roman numeral substitution (à la Da5id, a character from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash) or other uses of digits within words have not been tried out yet on a wide scale.
Maybe the world will tire of new schemes for a while, bringing retro naming into focus. That should be good news for law firms and other partnerships struggling to get rid of original partner names in the wake of mergers. And of course for Ziffren, Brittenham, Branca, Fischer, Gilbert-Lurie, Stiffelman, Cook, Johnson, Lande & Wolf.
[Although not explicitly indicated, the trademarks, service marks and registered trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners.]
Tags: trademarks Apple naming 2.0 Trademarks 2.0 Web 2.0 Enterprise 2.0 law firms Snow Crash CamelCase
I kinda like the whole 2000 thing. There used to be a food joint in Cologne, Germany that went by the name "Imbiss 2000". Wow! Now that's where I want to get my gyros! ;-)
Posted by: Tim | 30 January 2007 at 21:10
Ugebladet Ingeniøren udgiver nu et andet blad, onlineblad og trykt medie.
det hedder simpelthen Version 2.0
http://www.version2.dk/
De har lige lanceret en it-wiki på dansk.
Fint redskab:
http://www.version2.dk/leksikon/Forside
venlig hilsen
Abelone
Posted by: Abelone Glahn | 05 February 2007 at 11:37