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Can I ask the thinking behind how you name your products? I had some difficulty understanding what you are selling - a groupware suite with API integration? If

by shubb 13y ago

Can I ask the thinking behind how you name your products? I had some difficulty understanding what you are selling - a groupware suite with API integration? If all your sub-products make sense used as part of a suite, why not talk about the suite and it's capabilities, rather than a collection of products with strange names? (hope this is useful feedback, good luck!)

mindcrime 13y ago
Can I ask the thinking behind how you name your products? Sure, it's all based on our overall branding theory. The company name is "Fogbeam Labs" and the logo is a lighthouse, and our (current) slogan is "Cut through the information fog". So everything is based on ideas around light, illumination, and helping people see what is currently unseen. Given that, Quoddy, Heceta, Neddick and Hatteras are all named after famous lighthouses. At one time we debated using a model where those names would be more like "internal names" and would be the name of the Open Source project, and then using a different name for the "branded" commercial release. Something like the way Red Hat use "Fedora" for their upstream distro and "RHEL" for their branded release, or "Wildfly" for the upstream JBoss and "JBOSS EAP" for the branded release of that. But when we sat down to think about doing that, we kept coming back up with scenarios like "Quoddy" -> "Fogbeam Enterprise Social Whatever" or "Hatteras" -> "Fogbeam Business Event Engine" and nobody on our team liked "Fogbeam Enterprise Social Whatever" and the ilk. So we decided just to use the "base" names, and tag "Enterprise" onto the end to discriminate between the underlying OSS project and the commercially supported releases. "Quoddy" -> "Quoddy Enterprise" etc. Is it perfect? Probably not, but we're running with it for now. If it doesn't seem to be working, we may revisit it. As an aside, I did learn one important lesson during all this... at one time, I was trying to be too cute with using lighthouse related terms, and we had a project named "Screwpile". A little later, one of our advisors pointed out that "it makes sense if you know what screwpile means[1], but nobody does, and if you don't, it just sounds ugly, almost vulgar even". And then I realized just how bad that was. We yanked that and renamed it "Fogcutter" instead. :-) I had some difficulty understanding what you are selling - a groupware suite with API integration? I try to shy away from using the term "groupware" because it has existing connotations that don't necessarily apply to what we're doing. I'd probably say a "suite of knowledge management tools" over saying "groupware", but we are kind on the boundaries of the existing terminology to some extent, so we're still iterating on the terminology to use in our messaging. But basically, we have - in Quoddy - an "enterprise social network" (kinda like Jive or Yammer), but with much better support for integrating with other enterprise applications and knowledge sources, and using semantic integration to fully unite knowledge and information across disparate sources, so we can provide relevant context at the user's fingertips when they are examining any given event, task, or piece of content. Neddick, on the other hand, is like "Reddit for the Enterprise". It's link sharing, social news, and that sort of thing, but - again - tailored more to be useful as a tool within an organization. If all your sub-products make sense used as part of a suite, why not talk about the suite and it's capabilities, rather than a collection of products with strange names? That's another place where we're still exploring what's going to make the most sense. Are people going to want to hear about (and buy) the entire suite, or are significant numbers of people going to want one piece, or the other, but not both? We don't know the answer to that yet, so it's all still in a state of flux. Ideally, as we learn more about how people react to this, the messaging and branding will become more clear. (hope this is useful feedback, good luck!) It is, and thanks! [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw-pile_lighthouse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw-pile_lighthouse

by shubb 13y ago

mindcrime 13y ago

Can I ask the thinking behind how you name your products? Sure, it's all based on our overall branding theory. The company name is "Fogbeam Labs" and the logo is a lighthouse, and our (current) slogan is "Cut through the information fog". So everything is based on ideas around light, illumination, and helping people see what is currently unseen. Given that, Quoddy, Heceta, Neddick and Hatteras are all named after famous lighthouses. At one time we debated using a model where those names would be more like "internal names" and would be the name of the Open Source project, and then using a different name for the "branded" commercial release. Something like the way Red Hat use "Fedora" for their upstream distro and "RHEL" for their branded release, or "Wildfly" for the upstream JBoss and "JBOSS EAP" for the branded release of that. But when we sat down to think about doing that, we kept coming back up with scenarios like "Quoddy" -> "Fogbeam Enterprise Social Whatever" or "Hatteras" -> "Fogbeam Business Event Engine" and nobody on our team liked "Fogbeam Enterprise Social Whatever" and the ilk. So we decided just to use the "base" names, and tag "Enterprise" onto the end to discriminate between the underlying OSS project and the commercially supported releases. "Quoddy" -> "Quoddy Enterprise" etc. Is it perfect? Probably not, but we're running with it for now. If it doesn't seem to be working, we may revisit it. As an aside, I did learn one important lesson during all this... at one time, I was trying to be too cute with using lighthouse related terms, and we had a project named "Screwpile". A little later, one of our advisors pointed out that "it makes sense if you know what screwpile means[1], but nobody does, and if you don't, it just sounds ugly, almost vulgar even". And then I realized just how bad that was. We yanked that and renamed it "Fogcutter" instead. :-) I had some difficulty understanding what you are selling - a groupware suite with API integration? I try to shy away from using the term "groupware" because it has existing connotations that don't necessarily apply to what we're doing. I'd probably say a "suite of knowledge management tools" over saying "groupware", but we are kind on the boundaries of the existing terminology to some extent, so we're still iterating on the terminology to use in our messaging. But basically, we have - in Quoddy - an "enterprise social network" (kinda like Jive or Yammer), but with much better support for integrating with other enterprise applications and knowledge sources, and using semantic integration to fully unite knowledge and information across disparate sources, so we can provide relevant context at the user's fingertips when they are examining any given event, task, or piece of content. Neddick, on the other hand, is like "Reddit for the Enterprise". It's link sharing, social news, and that sort of thing, but - again - tailored more to be useful as a tool within an organization. If all your sub-products make sense used as part of a suite, why not talk about the suite and it's capabilities, rather than a collection of products with strange names? That's another place where we're still exploring what's going to make the most sense. Are people going to want to hear about (and buy) the entire suite, or are significant numbers of people going to want one piece, or the other, but not both? We don't know the answer to that yet, so it's all still in a state of flux. Ideally, as we learn more about how people react to this, the messaging and branding will become more clear. (hope this is useful feedback, good luck!) It is, and thanks! [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw-pile_lighthouse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw-pile_lighthouse