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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 03/20/98 -- Vol. 16, No. 38
MT Chair/Librarian:
Mark Leeper MT 3E-433 732-957-5619 mleeper@lucent.com
HO Chair: John Jetzt MT 2E-530 732-957-5087 jetzt@lucent.com
HO Librarian: Nick Sauer HO 4F-427 732-949-7076 njs@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist:
Rob Mitchell MT 2D-536 732-957-6330 rlmitchell1@lucent.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper MT 3E-433 732-957-2070 eleeper@lucent.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4824
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County meets on the
second Saturday of every month in Upper Saddle River; call
201-933-2724 for details. The New Jersey Science Fiction Society
meets irregularly; call 201-652-0534 for details, or check
http://www.interactive.net/~kat/njsfs.html. The Denver Area
Science Fiction Association meets 7:30 PM on the third Saturday of
every month at Southwest State Bank, 1380 S. Federal Blvd.
1. URLs of the week: http://www.sfsite.com/analog/ and
http://www.sfsite.com/asimovs/. Web sites for ANALOG and ASIMOVS
magazines. While they don't have the full contents, they do
include some of the columns, and currently have the full texts of
their Nebula-nominated stories. [-ecl]
===================================================================
2. I don't know if you have given it much thought, but there is a
new form of real estate market that is becoming a major industry.
It is a real estate market that parcels out not land but language.
Just as there is a physical real estate industry governing who owns
land, there is also a logical one that parcels out words. And many
of the same rules apply. The physical real estate industry that
deals with pieces of land we are all used to. Land is valuable
because, as Mark Twain put it, they don't make it any more. Not
entirely true of course, nature and people make new land all the
time, but nature is slow, not to mention arbitrary and capricious
as to how it makes land. But the new logical real estate deals in
words. It is a lot cheaper because you are not dealing with
physical matter but in combinations of letters of the alphabet and
those really do not get made any more. There are only so many
pronounceable words under ten characters and they are pretty much
the same set we had 100 years ago.
Suppose I want to name my new company something like Quadrant.
Well, I have to do a title search to see if there already is
somebody who owns that name. The probability that someone owns
that name is just about 100%. The odds are really good that there
is a company of that name already, but even if there is not,
somebody else probably still owns the name Quadrant. There are
speculators who think up good names for companies and if they are
not already owned by someone else they register their plan to make
a company in that name. Now they have no such intention, but by
reselling the name to some corporation that wants it they can make
a tidy profit. I remember that when our company name was announced
as "Lucent" people looked on the Web and discovered there already
was a company named Lucent. The company had exactly one asset:
its name. It sold the rights to that name for a really nice
profit. It was owned by a word speculator, someone much like a
land speculator. So some speculator someplace owns Quadrant if
there is no company of that name.
In the world of globalization there are fewer and fewer safe words
that can be used for a product name. Most of us have heard about
how Chevrolet was embarrassed when they tried to sell the Chevy
Nova in Mexico since "Nova" is so close to "no va" meaning in
Spanish "it does not go." In a recent Diversity meeting this was
used as an example of how Chevrolet did not have the cultural
awareness to not call the car Nova. Actually aside from a few
small jokes, Chevrolet had no problem with the name initially. It
was when someone raised their cultural consciousness and told them
to change the name that they got into the real trouble. How we
feel if for American release the Beatles had changed the name of
their song from "Nowhere Man" to "No Place Man" because otherwise
Yanks were probably going to think it meant "Now Here Man." How
would we feel? We would have felt patronized. We would have been
angry that they consider us such dumb clucks. Well, that was how
the Mexicans felt about Chevy changing the name of their car just
for Mexico. There is such a thing as being too concerned about
cultural differences.
US News & World Report 10/13/97 tells how one company used the name
"Telemon." That was fine until they tried to sell the product in
Thailand where "Telemon" is incest with one's mother. It is tough
to come up with a technical word that is not somebody's name for a
laxative.
The problem is the world is getting more global and at the same
time names are getting taken and used. The time is coming when all
the good names are going to be taken, just like all the good plots
of land. Then the price of good words is going to go way up.
There will probably be a trademark tax.
And I am just talking about words here. Even numbers are desirable
and undesirable. Ask a resident of Manhattan if he minds being in
the group who will no longer have area code 212.
Oh, and checking the Web I discover my example of "Quadrant" should
not be taken too literally. There already is a Quadrant
Communications. [-mrl]
Mark Leeper
MT 3E-433 732-957-5619
mleeper@lucent.com
Television is democracy at its ugliest.
-- Paddy Chayefsky