360angles

A US Army intelligence report has identified popular micro-blogging service, and web 2.0 darling, Twitter as a potential terrorist tool.

This is from the official marketing material posted last night by RIM’s Storm launch partner, Vodafone. It’s an interesting tactic. They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but when you’re trying to take on a competitor whose main strength is slick, thoughtful products with amazing launches (Mobile Me aside), EPIC FAIL at product launch, may not be the best strategy…

[via Engagdet]

Someone got canned over this for sure. Bloomberg news sent a preliminary obituary of Steve Jobs out over their news wire yesterday. It was quickly retracted, but raised more than a few eyebrows, considering the pancreatic cancer rumors that have been swirling around the Apple icon lately. Gawker has the full obit, if you care to parse.

Reuters reports that Orange (a European wireless service provider) is padding a lukewarm Polish iPhone reception by paying actors to “line-up” outside 20 stores to “buy” the Apple iPhone. Ah, there’s nothing like alienating your core customers to possibly generate some new ones. Hey, I’ve got an idea, how about you make your current product/service so amazing that you core customers can’t help but recruit new ones for you?

UPDATE 8/28/08: Orange denies it. The outside hires aren’t to stand in line, “Their aim is to welcome people to the Orange shop, share in their excitement and give information about Orange tariffs,” a spokeswoman told Ad Age.

After staring sadly at the number of reality show competitions on TV these days and longing for a show that would truly touch my soul, I’m frightened glad to hear that designers (in this case digital artists) finally get a show of their own. I know, its hard to believe that MTV would produce a show thats not about music, but believe it or not, thats where you can find this program in September. The show is called Engine Room, probably because it sounds cool. Anyway, it looks to be interesting at the very least, so check out the Engine Room website and keep your eyes open. We’ll try too keep you posted on when this show premieres, so check back every single day like you already do.

I’m also intrigued by the unique partnership with HP as well. HP makes nice laptops, I’ve got one at home, but the majority of digital artists use Macs to do their work, so this is kind of like seeing Snoop Dog selling acoustic guitars. I can understand that HP is trying to sell their brand as design savvy and that’s cool, I just wish I could have seen the look on the designers’ faces (many of whom have probably never used a PC) when they were told they would be doing everything on an Hewlett Packard.

Oh, by the way, that sure is an awesome logo for Engine Room. I enjoy the use of the lightning bolts and the circle with the white ring. Boy, that sure looks familiar. (For those who don’t look at our awesome logo every day, heres an “Engine Roomified” Voltage Creative logo next to the one for Engine Room for you to check out.)

The response to our I’ll Give You $50 for a Worse Brand Name Than Knol contest was great! We had exactly 100 replies as of the this posting. Many were fantastic, but we had to choose. It was hard, so we felt we had to list a few honorable mentions first. Then we’ll get to the winner. The honorable mentions go to…

Comment #24: Erud

From the root erudition. Since the Google idea is that people write articles about stuff they know, and attach their name to the article. The writers are experts in a field, and can show off that expertise. Erudition implies bookish knowledge that is above an average person’s comprehension, so right away the name can give people some unease while at the same time stroke their egos. Are they really smart enough to be reading, let alone writing for this thing? But if you do write for it, doesn’t that make you somehow better than other people?

Now this name doesn’t have the soft ending like Knol, but it does have the advantage of sounding too hard; too short. Erud; sounds like rude.

Comment #37: Knowr

A forgettable derivative of the word “knowledge”, hurts your mouth to say, a shameless implementation of Domain Naming 2.0 ™, the domain is parked, etc, etc.; a categorically worse brand than “Knol”.

Comment #45: nuur

How about “Newer”. Maybe “Nuir” or “Nure”. Nope. I’ve got it. The name for our salon should be Nuur!

Bonus points for involuntarily sounding like a retarded person when you say it! : )

Comment #68: phamthe

Comment #95: Vaio

wtf.

AND THE WINNER IS…

#30: Whol

(As in: something that contains the whol of our knol-edge. Ahem.)

* Silent letter. Could be either W or H, depending!
* Starts and ends with weak sounds.
* Unclear pronunciation. Hole? Hahl? Hall? Wole? Wahl? Wall?
* Potential homonym for “hole”, which yields TONS of awful-sounding spoken constructions. “You got that from a (hole)?” “I’ve got a (hole).” “Hey, look at this (hole)!” “Stick that in your (hole)”.
* One letter away from Whor.

Congrats to Drew Thaler. You should receive an email shortly to get your payment details. Then we’ll send you $50.

Thanks to everyone who participated!

UPDATE! Being an honorable fellow Drew has opted to donate the prize money to Cleveland Scholarhip Programs to help educate children about the perils of terrible branding.

Having a graphic designer look at this website is kind of like asking a chef to snort wasabi: RAINBOWDIVIDERS.COM (NOT an Epileptic-safe link.)

Viewing Tips:

1. Make sure you hit refresh a couple of times to get the full effect.
2. Scroll all the way to the bottom to check out the pixelated CSS and HTML compliant badges.
3. Even their page title is obnoxiously dynamic, don’t miss it.

Question: wither is their animated favicon? (Me: dissapointed)

Knol is Google’s newest assault on the rest of the internet. (They’re convinced they own it.) I’m sure it will do well, because it’s a Google property, but…

K-N-O-L is their brand name? I couldn’t think of a worse name if I tried. In fact, I’ll offer a cash prize for a worse name. (Details at the end of this article.) First, let’s explore this:

• Knol contains a silent letter.
• Phonetically, It starts and ends with a soft consonant. (This guarantees the following conversation will be had countless times… “Blah blah blah Knol.” “What?”)
• It’s a play on the word knowledge, masquerading as the root. (Which is actually “know”.) But they drop the “w” and add the “l” leaving us with “knol.”
• They don’t even own Knol.com. Knol is at knol.google.com. Knol.com, on the other hand, sells steam cleaners in Sweden. No kidding. This is who Google couldn’t afford to buy out.

Google is liquid to the tune of $10 billion dollars. Couldn’t they buy knol.com? Or even something nice like know.com, or known.com? And what’s with the web 2.0 drop-a-letter-add-a-letter bandwagon? This is going to look passé in 6 months. It kinda looks that way right now.

Apple Inc. just bought Me.com. Now that’s a domain. That’s a brand name. Sure the launch sucked, but no one will care in 6 months. They will, however, still be having this conversation:

“…Knol.”

“What?”

“No. KNOL.”

“What!?”

“KNOLLLL.”

“Nal?”

“Eh, screw it.”

Google was a game changer 6 years ago, but that is an eternity in web-years. They’re looking more and more like Microsoft or General Motors when it comes to fresh innovation and execution. It’s like they’re trying to confuse.

In fact, if anyone can come up with a worse brand name than Knol, post it in the comments. Next week I’ll pick out the worst one and Paypal you $50.

The Rules:

• Has to be SFW.
• 2 syllable maximum.
• Has to be pronounceable.
• I’ll announce the winner here next week. (I’ll also send them an email.)
• If you’re related to me or someone who works at Voltage, you can’t win.
• The winner is my pick, which means no whining if/when you lose.
• One entry per email address.
• Cuil doesn’t count.

Update: We Have a Winner