Naming briefs #6
Notes on Kagi, Aptos, and Sora: Three short brand names with non-English pedigrees.
In the naming business, a naming brief is a detailed written document that serves as a road map for name development and legal review. (Read more about the naming brief here.) The naming briefs in this newsletter are something else: short reports on names I’ve spotted in the wild or in my reading. This report is the sixth in a series; see the intro to Naming Briefs #5 for links to previous Naming Briefs. Have you come across an interesting company or product name you’d like me to critique? Let me know in a comment.
Kagi
Palo Alto-based Kagi, which Fast Company named one of the best new apps of 2023, isn’t aiming to out-Google Google; it just wants to be the internet-search alternative for people who prioritize privacy and zero ads. Its model is freemium: Your first 100 searches are free; subscriptions start at $5 a month for 300 searches. “Five billion people use a search engine, probably 99% would never pay,” founder Vladimir Prelovac told the search blog DKB.io in 2022. “The thing is, that tiny minority of people who think differently, the 1% that would pay, is still quite a large number. That's 50 million people.” Prelovac, who was born in the former Yugoslavia, chose a non-European name for his company and its search product: Kagi (pronounced kah-jee) is a Japanese word meaning “key.”
As a brand name, Kagi works on a couple of levels. The meaning of the word — once you, well, unlock it — is a good fit. The “K” in Kagi functions as a mnemonic for “key,” and “key” is a clever way to reposition “searching the web” as “opening the web.” But Kagi also functions as an empty-vessel name: a pleasant-sounding, relatively easy-to-pronounce two-syllable word that starts with the ever-compelling letter K. (I wrote about the allure of K words back in 2007.)
As effective as the Kagi name is, the rest of the branding doesn’t quite live up to its promise. I’m not crazy about the wordmark’s truncated lower-case letterforms. And the cartoon dog and “fetch” instruction seem to have trotted over from a different brand altogether.
Aptos
“After 17 years of Calibri as Word’s default typeface, many users suddenly found themselves typing in a new typeface called Aptos,” wrote New York Times reporter Victor Mather on February 28. Microsoft’s typeface change, he added, is also affecting the look of PowerPoint, Outlook, and Excel.1
Microsoft had quietly introduced Aptos in mid-January, calling it “a precise, contemporary sans serif typeface inspired by mid-20th-century Swiss typography” that “expresses simplicity and rationality in a highly readable form.” (There’s also an Aptos variation with serifs.) It was custom-designed for Microsoft by American type designer Steve Matteson and originally called Bierstadt, after the German American painter Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902).
“Aptos” was instantly recognizable to me and probably to thousands of other Californians as the name of a small unincorporated town in coastal Santa Cruz County. It’s a safe bet that Microsoft, for reasons I’ve been unable to unearth, borrowed the typeface name from the town.
What I hadn’t known until I researched the newsletter is that “Aptos” isn’t related to “apt” or any other European word. Instead, it comes from the language of the indigenous Ohlone people who first settled in the area. “There is a local tradition that the original meaning was ‘the meeting of two streams,’” Erwin Gudde wrote in California Place Names (fourth edition, 2004). Mysteriously, the Wikipedia entry cites Gudde but says Aptos is the Ohlone word for “the people.” Wikipedia also says that Aptos “is one of only three native words that have survived (in Hispanicized form) as place names in Santa Cruz County (the others are Soquel and Zayante).”
Microsoft’s Aptos isn’t the only Aptos in the digital universe. Aptos is also the name of “the world’s most production-ready blockchain.” Its parent company, Aptos Foundation, was founded in 2010 and is based in the Cayman Islands; a site glossary claims that Aptos means “the people.”
Why did Microsoft change the typeface’s name from Bierstadt to Aptos? Andrew Zuo, an app developer who writes about internet controversies, posits that there were legal issues. Zuo, by the way, is not shy about asserting that Aptos/Bierstadt “is the most disgusting font I’ve ever seen.”
Sora
Here’s yet another reason to feel deeply ambivalent about artificial intelligence: Sora, introduced in mid-February by OpenAI, “is an AI model that can create realistic and imaginative scenes” — video scenes — “from text instructions.”
“We already know that OpenAI’s chatbots can pass the bar exam without going to law school,” Steven Levy wrote in Wired last month. “Now, just in time for the Oscars, a new OpenAI app called Sora hopes to master cinema without going to film school.” OpenAI, in case you’ve forgotten, is also responsible for ChatGPT and DALL-E, although I’m not sure “responsible” is quite accurate here.
My field is names, not ethics, and here’s what I can tell you about the Sora name: It’s Japanese for “sky,” and its developers chose it because it “evokes the idea of limitless creative potential.”
They were not the first to seize on this connection — not by a long shot. A search of the USPTO database reveals more than 27,000 live U.S. trademarks for SORA, including for Sora Schools, Sora e-cigarettes, Sora private-equity consulting, a Sora medical clinic, and a Sora bank card. A hospitality company called Sonifi owns multiple trademarks for SORA, a “next-generation interactive platform.” Shimano, the Japanese bicycle company, owns trademarks for Sora bicycle parts.
I’ll grant that Sora is a effective name for AI technology: more poetic, less robotic than, say, ChatGPT. It evokes “soar,” as in “fly high.” But whenever I think of “fly high” I also think of Icarus and his melty fate. So, yes, I’m worried about Sora. The good news, such as it is, is that OpenAI is not yet releasing it to the public. Instead, the New York Times reported, it’s “sharing the technology with a small group of academics and other outside researchers who will ‘red team’ it, a term for looking for ways it can be misused.”
Take all the time you need, friends. And then some more time.
I am not related to Jon Friedman, the Microsoft design VP quoted in the Times article.
As I'm sure you know, Sora is also the Yiddish equivalent of Sarah. I doubt that entered into the name's development, but I can't see the word without thinking of my grandmother, whose Yiddish name was Basha Sora.
Calibri looks like a 9th generation photocopy, or out-of-focus version of Aptos. "Kerning", in my opinion, became academic with the introduction of phototype 60 years ago.
"Bierstadt" would be a good name for AI-generated photos; most look like florid, cheesy, Romantic 19th Century paintings. Good for movie posters or T-shirts.