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Jordan adds fuel to the fire

by Mars Riley On Friday, Michael Jordan was accepted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass. In many ways it felt like a final farewell to the playing career of the sport’s greatest. After a few comebacks, this was an exclamation point for a basketball player who had no parallel. After six titles,…

Disney and Marvel, sitting in a tree…

by Jeffery Racheff If you’re anywhere between the ages of 5 and 80, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve been affected by a Disney cartoon or a Marvel comic book character. Most of us were raised by Wolverine’s claws and/or spent our youths obsessed with the Little Mermaid’s efforts to grow legs. So when Disney…

Keeping a one-hit wonder on life support

  • About: Naming

Who Let the Dogs Out? was originally created for Trinidad and Tobago’s Carnival season in 1998. A visiting hairdresser from London apparently recorded it from a float in a parade and brought it back to the U.K. with him where he played it for his producer friend. Soon it was covered by the Baha Men…

The Beatles don’t sing Bon Jovi

by Mars Riley All of us want to be rock stars. This is a proven fact. If you were born between 1956 and 2005, you have stood in front of the mirror, air guitar in hand, imagining yourself in front of an enraptured crowd. Maybe you were yourself, but just as likely you were Jimi…

Energy drinks: why some names buzz, and others just crash

  • About: Naming

by Jeffery Racheff Energy drinks have come a long way since the first drowsy adventurer mixed coffee beans and water. Nowadays the concoctions are brewed in endless varieties, and most are jam-packed with sugar, caffeine and exotic magical herbs like taurine and gingko biloba that make them sound like something you’d get from a witch…

Name your company automatically

  • About: Naming

There are a number of services on the web that promise to name your company without any human involvement–you know how messy dealing with people can be. They are typically called automatic name generators and may spew out choices one-by-one or by the hundreds. So I decided to put a few of them through their…

Owning Lizzie Borden

by Mars Riley In 1892, on a hot August morning, the town of Fall River, Massachusetts would change forever. Before that day it had been the leading manufacturer of textiles in the U.S., afterward it was known as the home of Lizzie “took an ax, gave her mother forty whacks, when she saw what she…

Honoring Michael Jackson with a subway station? Not a ‘Bad’ idea

by Jeffery Racheff Two months after the iconic singer’s tragic death, the party celebrating Michael Jackson rages on. Fans are crafting homemade “Thriller” dance videos, major studios are planning films of unreleased concert footage, and cities are staging day-long Jackson-themed jubilations. In Malaysia, they even have Michael Jackson tigers. So if there ever was a…

The meerkat problem (it’s simples!)

Lesson #1: Choose a name for your company that is memorable, especially if your competitors offer the exact same services you do. Using perfunctory names and Google AdWords to position your product will work for a while, but eventually a competitor will make an emotional connection with the public and you’ll be fighting an uphill…

Take your cheese to the bank

What’s the difference between Kraft Parmesan cheese and Parmigiano-Reggiano?  Well, aside from the taste, and the fact that they’ve been making it in Italy since 1200, you can take the real stuff to the bank. Here’s the difference between a commodity brand and something people really want to get their hands on. When Italian cheese…

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