Choosing the saynotopremium Name
There’s a real problem with naming things after technologies, or version numbers or phone numbers. All of those things are subject to change, and when they do, your name looks wrong or out of date.
When we started our mobile software development company we could have called it “J2ME development company” because J2ME was the technology that was powering some of the most innovative mobile development at the time. In a way it still is, however a while back Sun decided to change the name from J2ME to JME, in fact Sun is always changing the name of it’s Java related products and it makes it a right pain when you’re searching for things on the web. Anyway that’s a rant for another time.
The point is: good job we didn’t peg our name to something that is subject to change.
I feel sorry for dotMobi sometimes because the company does a lot of cool things for mobile developers but has, as it’s name, a technology concept that a lot of people in the mobile industry (including some people who work for dotMobi I suspect) think is a bad idea (the .mobi domain name extension).
There are a few brands that are so big, we just accept them as they are and it doesn’t really matter where they come from. I was a bit surprised when Hutchison 3G decided to use 3 as a brand name but I suppose they’re such a large brand that if 4th generation mobile technology starts to be talked about in a big way it won’t be relevant to their brand anymore. It’s a bit like the Beatles. That’s a pretty naff name when you think about it, but how many people stop to think that it’s a word play on beetle and beat, it’s no longer relevant. Led Zeppelin too, if pushed I’d say that was my all time favourite band of all time in the world, but the name is a bit dodgy if you think about it too much.
Anyhoo, that’s why saynotopremium.co.uk is as it is. I like the whole “say no to” thing, but Ofcom changes it’s rules and numbering schemes periodically so tying yourself to one number is not a good idea. Also there is a lot of confusion around these numbers the various prefixes mean different things and to be usefull, a number translation service needs to be able to translate all the different prefixes, not just one. The fact that there are so many squatter sites registered at things like saynoto0845.com proves that there is confusion here.