6 ms·

Startups fighting over the word 'zen'

46 points by ojbyrne 12y ago

Fuzzwah 12y ago
In other naming clash news; I've noticed that a bunch of companies have launched things named Atlas recently: * hashicorp's application delivery system [1] * netflix's telemetry platform [2] * oreilly's new learning environment [3] * a high-performance and stable proxy for MySQL [4] * a fitness tracker [5] * of course, facebook's atlas [6] [1] https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/atlas.html https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/atlas.html [2] http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/12/introducing-atlas-netflixs-primary.html http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/12/introducing-atlas-netfli... [3] http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/tags/featured http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/tags/featured [4] https://github.com/Qihoo360/Atlas https://github.com/Qihoo360/Atlas [5] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/atlas-the-first-fitness-tracker-that-actually-tracks-your-workout https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/atlas-the-first-fitness-t... [6] http://atlassolutions.com/2014/09/29/meet-the-new-atlas/ http://atlassolutions.com/2014/09/29/meet-the-new-atlas/ All of these are up against some already pretty strong SEO for the keyword too: https://www.google.com/search?q=atlas https://www.google.com/search?q=atlas
- driverdan 12y ago
  Also https://atlas.torproject.org/ https://atlas.torproject.org/
- gregoire 12y ago
  There's also Mapbox's Altas Server: https://www.mapbox.com/enterprise/ https://www.mapbox.com/enterprise/
snuxoll 12y ago
Sorry Zendesk, Novell has you beat by many years for things starting with "Zen".
- hyperliner 12y ago
  Novell? The Chinese beat everybody by about 14 centuries or more!
  - meepmorp 12y ago
    But it was Chán till the Japanese iterated on it and disrupted the Mahayana world.
lotsofmangos 12y ago
"For Zendesk, ideas associated with zen are now deeply ingrained in the company’s culture and branding. The company mascot is a Laughing Buddha, dubbed “The Mentor,” who wears a telephone headset." They should be very careful doing business in several Buddhist countries with that as their mascot. In a lot of places it would go down about as well as a tech support business called YahwehDesk, promoted with a picture of Jesus in a call center.
- photex 12y ago
  This is my first thought every time I see a Buddha used as a charming icon for something.
- gohrt 12y ago
  s/ideas associated with zen/tacky cultural affectations/
- prawn 12y ago
  Three men (one New Zealander, two locals) have recently been arrested and face trial in Myanmar after promoting their bar with a poster featuring Buddha with headphones: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/12/13/in-burma-its-a-crime-to-put-headphones-on-the-buddha/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/12/13...
rblion 12y ago
Can't even find words for this level of irony.
- gohrt 12y ago
  "ZenDesk, this is your Moment of Zen" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Daily_Show_recurring_segments#Your_Moment_of_Zen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Daily_Show_recurrin...
- spacefight 12y ago
  Irony? Absolute trademark stupidity. Unless the other zen* companies are offering a helpdesk software, there should not be ground for a legal dispute.
  - duffyt 12y ago
    Personally, when I first heard of Zenpayroll and Zenefits I though they were similar enough services that they might be associated with Zendesk. I think there's definitely possibility of confusion. http://marklaw.com/trademark-glossary/confuse.htm http://marklaw.com/trademark-glossary/confuse.htm
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  mu
wmeredith 12y ago
Ask any trademark lawyer worth their salt and they'll tell you, "don't put a noun in your company name." That's why you get law firms named Shook, Hardy & Bacon L.L.P. and not ZenLaw, LLC.
- bdr 12y ago
  So it's ok if you have a verb and an adjective first?
  - percept 12y ago
    (Followed by a food group.)
    - arthurcolle 12y ago
      Beans, bacon, whiskey and lard. Everyone knows the four basic food groups.
spacefight 12y ago
I was evaluating Zendesk and I already signed up for zopim. I am going to ditch both.
nwatson 12y ago
Zenprise founded 2003 acquired by Citrix 2013, product now called XenMobile.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
mkehrt 12y ago
Am I the only one who thinks naming your company after a religion is a little unpleasant?
- ertdfgcb 12y ago
  To be fair, Zen is much less a religion than Christianity, some would even call it a philosophy.
  - zedmonkey 12y ago
    This meme that Zen is a philosophy is incredibly unfair / misguided. It's a religion. It's a branch of Mahayana Buddhism, it's practised as a religion, in some regions it still has the aspects of Guru and Deity worship that have been inherited from the larger schools. The full name of the religion is Zen Buddhism. As someone who has been involved with the religion and with Japanese friends who are also a part of it, it's incredibly belittling when this idea gets spread around. It's only in the West that all of the cultural and religious background has been stripped out and turned into a marketing device. I often joke that if Buddhism had more extremist members we'd have a lot more holy wars than anyone else. Dressed up Buddhas, Zen stapled onto every two bit startup and cheap product, blogs about consumerist driven minimalism selling themselves as "Zen". It really is ridiculous. What is being done here is just as offensive to eastern cultures as if an East Asian startup branded itself using Christian or Islamic imagery or terms, citing that it's all just "philosophy". Anyone stealing these terms and imagery really should read some of the critiques of Western misappropriation of Eastern "Spirituality" like "The Scientific Buddha" or "Selling Spirituality". Or even just take five minutes to consider the countries and contexts they might want to operate in as they grow.
    - thearn4 12y ago
      I feel a similair way about folks who describe software developers as "ninjas", "samurai", etc. As odd, very misplaced appropriations of east asian themes/imagery.
      - 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
grellas 12y ago
Even as a lawyer, one becomes weary after a time in seeing how people use the law to abuse others. The key to this sort of trademark claim is likelihood of confusion or perhaps implied endorsement in having a common-sounding name. Where it is obvious that two companies are in entirely unrelated fields, then the holder of the mark who wants to shut others down had better have a very strong mark such that any use by others of something that sounds similar implies affiliation or endorsement. There is no way that this is the case with the "zen" prefix. Even on a personal level, I represented companies known as Zentek Strategy and Zentek Technology, the latter of which became a $2B market cap company before having issues in 2008. We filed and got a registered trademark for "Zentek" and held this from about 1990 through 2008 when the company had some problems and shut its operations. The mark that we registered was not even in Class 9 (where most tech companies file for marks) but in another class because there was already another long-established "zentek" company that held a registered mark in Class 9. So, wow, the claimant here says, in effect, "we have been using 'zen' since 2007 and so we have a right to claim this exclusively as our own." And it then proceeds to file formal proceedings against all sort of other companies to force them to spend large sums of money or else give up using their marks that share only a common prefix. Call it what you will. I call this abuse, pure and simple. I can only hope that the people doing this take pride in their coolness as zen proponents even as display the height of arrogance in how they choose to act.
- marincounty 12y ago
  You definetly have a book in you on this topic alone. There are a lot of people with meager funds who can't afford to trademark their name, or business--and get bullied. I would like to see every native born citizen given one free shot at a trademark. After, that one shot; the price would skyrocket so companies would have to think twice about--3 dozen trademarks.
  - cbhl 12y ago
    What stops $first_employer from making $file_trademark_on_behalf_of_company a condition of employment?
  - thebear 12y ago
anigbrowl 12y ago
Mumon said, 'Those who cling onto words are fools who believe that they can catch the moon with a stick or can scratch their itchy foot through a leather shoe.' http://www.csudh.edu/phenom_studies/mumonkan/mumonkan.htm http://www.csudh.edu/phenom_studies/mumonkan/mumonkan.htm If this is new to you, I recommend starting out with #29.
suzyperplexus 12y ago
It surprises me that the company is moving forward with this, when they're so known for being cool in other areas like community programs. http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2014/02/28/twitter-tax-break-beneficiary-zendesk-launches-app-help-homeless-0 http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2014/02/28/twitter-tax-break-be... It just seems like they're so clearly the most well known "Zen" brand out there. And if this whole thing is about branding, then why not focus on the defensibility of the product rather than the name? Am I being naive here?
kragen 12y ago
This seems like an open threat against Zen Buddhism — Zendesk is trying to gain ownership of the word "Zen". I wonder if we could get some abbots of monasteries to file a claim with the USPTO to revoke Zendesk's trademark?
steven2012 12y ago
We use Zendesk at work, and when I saw articles with Zenpayroll in it, I honestly thought it was associated with Zendesk. I'm not sure if that's enough of a bar to allow a lawsuit though, but it is a bit confusing, especially since they both deal with back office SaaS.
giarc 12y ago
>bizarre compound words (Pinterest) have proliferated. I actually think Pinterest is one of the greater names of recent. You can easily discern that the site is about "interests" and then when you learn about "pinning" items, the name becomes obvious.

46 points by ojbyrne 12y ago

In other naming clash news; I've noticed that a bunch of companies have launched things named Atlas recently: * hashicorp's application delivery system [1] * netflix's telemetry platform [2] * oreilly's new learning environment [3] * a high-performance and stable proxy for MySQL [4] * a fitness tracker [5] * of course, facebook's atlas [6] [1] https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/atlas.html https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/atlas.html [2] http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/12/introducing-atlas-netflixs-primary.html http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/12/introducing-atlas-netfli... [3] http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/tags/featured http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/tags/featured [4] https://github.com/Qihoo360/Atlas https://github.com/Qihoo360/Atlas [5] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/atlas-the-first-fitness-tracker-that-actually-tracks-your-workout https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/atlas-the-first-fitness-t... [6] http://atlassolutions.com/2014/09/29/meet-the-new-atlas/ http://atlassolutions.com/2014/09/29/meet-the-new-atlas/ All of these are up against some already pretty strong SEO for the keyword too: https://www.google.com/search?q=atlas https://www.google.com/search?q=atlas

driverdan 12y ago
Also https://atlas.torproject.org/ https://atlas.torproject.org/
gregoire 12y ago
There's also Mapbox's Altas Server: https://www.mapbox.com/enterprise/ https://www.mapbox.com/enterprise/

snuxoll 12y ago

Sorry Zendesk, Novell has you beat by many years for things starting with "Zen".

hyperliner 12y ago
Novell? The Chinese beat everybody by about 14 centuries or more!
- meepmorp 12y ago
  But it was Chán till the Japanese iterated on it and disrupted the Mahayana world.

lotsofmangos 12y ago

"For Zendesk, ideas associated with zen are now deeply ingrained in the company’s culture and branding. The company mascot is a Laughing Buddha, dubbed “The Mentor,” who wears a telephone headset." They should be very careful doing business in several Buddhist countries with that as their mascot. In a lot of places it would go down about as well as a tech support business called YahwehDesk, promoted with a picture of Jesus in a call center.

photex 12y ago
This is my first thought every time I see a Buddha used as a charming icon for something.
gohrt 12y ago
s/ideas associated with zen/tacky cultural affectations/
prawn 12y ago
Three men (one New Zealander, two locals) have recently been arrested and face trial in Myanmar after promoting their bar with a poster featuring Buddha with headphones: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/12/13/in-burma-its-a-crime-to-put-headphones-on-the-buddha/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/12/13...

rblion 12y ago

Can't even find words for this level of irony.

gohrt 12y ago
"ZenDesk, this is your Moment of Zen" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Daily_Show_recurring_segments#Your_Moment_of_Zen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Daily_Show_recurrin...
spacefight 12y ago
Irony? Absolute trademark stupidity. Unless the other zen* companies are offering a helpdesk software, there should not be ground for a legal dispute.
- duffyt 12y ago
  Personally, when I first heard of Zenpayroll and Zenefits I though they were similar enough services that they might be associated with Zendesk. I think there's definitely possibility of confusion. http://marklaw.com/trademark-glossary/confuse.htm http://marklaw.com/trademark-glossary/confuse.htm
lotsofmangos 12y ago
mu

wmeredith 12y ago

Ask any trademark lawyer worth their salt and they'll tell you, "don't put a noun in your company name." That's why you get law firms named Shook, Hardy & Bacon L.L.P. and not ZenLaw, LLC.

bdr 12y ago
So it's ok if you have a verb and an adjective first?
- percept 12y ago
  (Followed by a food group.)
  - arthurcolle 12y ago
    Beans, bacon, whiskey and lard. Everyone knows the four basic food groups.

spacefight 12y ago

I was evaluating Zendesk and I already signed up for zopim. I am going to ditch both.

nwatson 12y ago

Zenprise founded 2003 acquired by Citrix 2013, product now called XenMobile.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

mkehrt 12y ago

Am I the only one who thinks naming your company after a religion is a little unpleasant?

ertdfgcb 12y ago
To be fair, Zen is much less a religion than Christianity, some would even call it a philosophy.
- zedmonkey 12y ago
  This meme that Zen is a philosophy is incredibly unfair / misguided. It's a religion. It's a branch of Mahayana Buddhism, it's practised as a religion, in some regions it still has the aspects of Guru and Deity worship that have been inherited from the larger schools. The full name of the religion is Zen Buddhism. As someone who has been involved with the religion and with Japanese friends who are also a part of it, it's incredibly belittling when this idea gets spread around. It's only in the West that all of the cultural and religious background has been stripped out and turned into a marketing device. I often joke that if Buddhism had more extremist members we'd have a lot more holy wars than anyone else. Dressed up Buddhas, Zen stapled onto every two bit startup and cheap product, blogs about consumerist driven minimalism selling themselves as "Zen". It really is ridiculous. What is being done here is just as offensive to eastern cultures as if an East Asian startup branded itself using Christian or Islamic imagery or terms, citing that it's all just "philosophy". Anyone stealing these terms and imagery really should read some of the critiques of Western misappropriation of Eastern "Spirituality" like "The Scientific Buddha" or "Selling Spirituality". Or even just take five minutes to consider the countries and contexts they might want to operate in as they grow.
  - thearn4 12y ago
    I feel a similair way about folks who describe software developers as "ninjas", "samurai", etc. As odd, very misplaced appropriations of east asian themes/imagery.
    - 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

grellas 12y ago

Even as a lawyer, one becomes weary after a time in seeing how people use the law to abuse others. The key to this sort of trademark claim is likelihood of confusion or perhaps implied endorsement in having a common-sounding name. Where it is obvious that two companies are in entirely unrelated fields, then the holder of the mark who wants to shut others down had better have a very strong mark such that any use by others of something that sounds similar implies affiliation or endorsement. There is no way that this is the case with the "zen" prefix. Even on a personal level, I represented companies known as Zentek Strategy and Zentek Technology, the latter of which became a $2B market cap company before having issues in 2008. We filed and got a registered trademark for "Zentek" and held this from about 1990 through 2008 when the company had some problems and shut its operations. The mark that we registered was not even in Class 9 (where most tech companies file for marks) but in another class because there was already another long-established "zentek" company that held a registered mark in Class 9. So, wow, the claimant here says, in effect, "we have been using 'zen' since 2007 and so we have a right to claim this exclusively as our own." And it then proceeds to file formal proceedings against all sort of other companies to force them to spend large sums of money or else give up using their marks that share only a common prefix. Call it what you will. I call this abuse, pure and simple. I can only hope that the people doing this take pride in their coolness as zen proponents even as display the height of arrogance in how they choose to act.

marincounty 12y ago
You definetly have a book in you on this topic alone. There are a lot of people with meager funds who can't afford to trademark their name, or business--and get bullied. I would like to see every native born citizen given one free shot at a trademark. After, that one shot; the price would skyrocket so companies would have to think twice about--3 dozen trademarks.
- cbhl 12y ago
  What stops $first_employer from making $file_trademark_on_behalf_of_company a condition of employment?
- thebear 12y ago

anigbrowl 12y ago

Mumon said, 'Those who cling onto words are fools who believe that they can catch the moon with a stick or can scratch their itchy foot through a leather shoe.' http://www.csudh.edu/phenom_studies/mumonkan/mumonkan.htm http://www.csudh.edu/phenom_studies/mumonkan/mumonkan.htm If this is new to you, I recommend starting out with #29.

suzyperplexus 12y ago

It surprises me that the company is moving forward with this, when they're so known for being cool in other areas like community programs. http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2014/02/28/twitter-tax-break-beneficiary-zendesk-launches-app-help-homeless-0 http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2014/02/28/twitter-tax-break-be... It just seems like they're so clearly the most well known "Zen" brand out there. And if this whole thing is about branding, then why not focus on the defensibility of the product rather than the name? Am I being naive here?

kragen 12y ago

This seems like an open threat against Zen Buddhism — Zendesk is trying to gain ownership of the word "Zen". I wonder if we could get some abbots of monasteries to file a claim with the USPTO to revoke Zendesk's trademark?

steven2012 12y ago

We use Zendesk at work, and when I saw articles with Zenpayroll in it, I honestly thought it was associated with Zendesk. I'm not sure if that's enough of a bar to allow a lawsuit though, but it is a bit confusing, especially since they both deal with back office SaaS.

giarc 12y ago

>bizarre compound words (Pinterest) have proliferated. I actually think Pinterest is one of the greater names of recent. You can easily discern that the site is about "interests" and then when you learn about "pinning" items, the name becomes obvious.