Would a rose by any other homonym stink this badly?

One would think that in the world of user generated content, mobile content delivery, and community web sites, there would be room for plenty of different companies using plenty of different brand names. And one would be right. It’s a huge market, with so many unexplored areas, and so much value yet to be realized, that it will take the combined efforts of scores of companies to really tap into the potential of the mobile phone. There are so many vectors from which one can approach the market that many companies should be able to run huge operations for a very long time before actually being stymied from direct competition with one another.

That’s really why it was utterly inconceivable to me when I first saw the press release from one of the largest “other” companies addressing the nascent mobile content market. In the press release, this company announced that they were changing their name such that it was virtually identical to the brand name used by our consumer facing web site. What kind of sh*thead move was this? Imagine you’ve just spent two years slaving over a sculpture masterpiece, refining it, perfecting it, giving it a personality and a life of its own in public, and some a**hole comes along and puts up a velvet Elvis painting directly in front of it. WTF?

The most unfortunate thing is that the feeling doesn’t get any better the more you get your hands around the situation. Sure, the initial shock wears off, but once the lawyers get involved, things quickly enter a downward spiral through an alternate universe of suit-wearing aliens speaking a barely comprehensible language of filings, motions, willfull disregards, and $2000/hour conference calls, until after a while you forget what you were trying to do in the first place: build a really cool website that lets people use their mobile phone in ways they couldn’t before. You end up spending all of this money on mercenaries – people absolutely convinced you are in the right, but who, you know deep in your heart, would fight like a banshee against you if someone else was paying their absurdly inflated rate – and why? Because some idiot across the country decides we have a cool name and he thinks because he just got a big fat check of venture money he can just pretend we don’t exist.

What is there to do? I wish I saw a choice. We have to let the dogs loose until they take back what is rightfully ours. It’s not fun, and not at all how I want to be spending our time and hard-won money, but we need to make sure our sculpture gets the attention it deserves. Something’s rotten in the state of Washington.