« Euro VCs Report Flurry of Online Deals Today | Main | A View From Paris on French VC Trends »
January 17, 2008
Puzzler Winners - Brands That Become Verbs
We asked for some recent examples of tech-related brands that have become part of the vocabulary, standing for a whole category of product, like Band-Aid, Biro, or Scotch Tape. Occasionally they become verbs e.g. hoovering and xeroxing.
We said that the first and tenth to write in with examples would win this week's Puzzler.
The first was Quintura co-founder and CEO Yakov Sadchikov (picture right -- who has won a couple of times before, we note).
He offered up some examples from Russia. He writes: people can say that they need to get new Kaspersky rather than say to get new security software. The other example has to do with email. He said that almost every Russian internet user has an email account on Mail.ru, some 28m in total. As a result, Mail (as in mail.ru) is associated with email.
The other winner this week is Gennie Chen (picture left), who is in executive strategy at Highbridge Capital Management, a New York-based global multi-strategy hedge fund. She was previously part of the technology investment banking team at Goldman Sachs.
The examples Chen gave: google (verb), as in to Google or lookup something in a search engine, and fedex (verb) to send a package using a private postal service.
A lot of you wrote with Google and Skype as verbs, and did so in several languages. For example, Neuhaus Captial Partners' Paul Jozefak wrote that "Googlen“ is common in German, as is Zippen (a verb that means to compress files from the product of the same name). We hear those brand/verbs in Switzerland too.
DuMont Venture's Philipp Moehring wrote in from Cologne, mentioning Google, but also said that the term wikipedia has become the word analysts use for wikis, in the same way that intels became a term for x86er processors.
Interestingly, not one reader suggested Spam...
Posted on January 17, 2008 07:41 AM | Posted to quiz | Permalink
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/6690
