When I am reading about a computer science professor and discover he has found a way for software to be much smarter at power management, I am not surprised. The fact he calls his company Miserware I think is a natural and applicable name and move on. Then I discover he calls the PC version Granola and I am pulled up fast. Did I hear right?
A break through free software program that is saving the world a lot of electricity and it is called Granola? I can hear the jingle now: “Granola isn’t just for breakfast anymore.” But since a very reputable magazine, BusinessWeek, first alerted me to this name and called it a brandname, I believed it to be real. And once I looked it up on miserware.com which flipped me over to grano.la (yes a website using the Laos country domain, not LA city.. at least not yet) the plot grew deeper. I am sure there is a play on the name somehow, perhaps from granularity. While I am just guessing here I do think that is more likely than someone looking at his breakfast dish or lunch box and going Aha!
And since Businessweek called it a brandname, I had to check and see if it was a registered trademark. Well this turned into a quick lesson on how hard it can be to look up certain names on the USPTO.gov website if you don’t know what you are doing. The first trademark search box I got to, I typed in granola of course.. and got 3076 hits to be precise! Wow. Backup.. let us rather narrow search to a name or partial name in the software category (9) and see what happens. I find an expired trademark for Granola Disk, and nothing else.
Oh well, with such an unusual name and prolific download rate, I suppose no one is going to copy your unique product name, so why pay the small trademark registration fee? Certainly in the food category it is a generic word and therefore not trademarkable, but in software it is unique and I really wanted to properly credit it with the Circle R brand – ®.
P.S. Also a great example of how a product name logo does not have to be boring.
Greetings, I I stumbled upon your site on yahoo and browse pretty much all your other pages. I just added you to my RSS feeder. Keep up the amazing job. Looking forward to reading more from you in the future. You know, I must say, I really enjoy this site and the insight from everyone who participates. I find it to be refreshing and very informative. I wish there were more blogs like it. Anyway, I felt it was about time I posted, I?ve spent most of my time here just lurking and reading, but today for some reason I just felt compelled to say this.
Enjoyed your article. Some interesting guesses as to where we came up with Granola…alas, the urban dictionary describes a “granola” as a person passionate about the environment. Thanks for the recognition…our experience has been people either love or hate the name; but they always remember it
. Regards, Kirk Cameron, CEO and co-founder of MiserWare.
Hello from Barcelona, Spain. I work in food packaging and I enjoy transforming commodities into branded categories. It is always rewarding to learn from other industries, this time Software solutions and Granola got my attention tonight. I like your blog very much. Thank you for the great article. My passion is naming and creating brands. I love the name Granola, the Blue colors used creates joyous expectations instead of technical nerdy. I find the name smart, innovative and fresh. A fresh way to say start off powerfully on the right foot taking the fear factor away of not knowing computer software. A similar example of same feeling, in Spain there is a bank that does FreshBanking. http://www.ingdirect.es/sobre-ing/fresh-banking/