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What's in a name (part 2): RUCKSACK it is!

That's right. We're going with Rucksack after all!

This is (mildly) embarrassing. The best of the bad explanations I can offer is, it takes a lot of time to get ready to kill one company and start another one, even very small companies. In the process of doing my company-name research, I failed to notice that 37Signals had, some months ago, released an iPhone app called "Daypack." Sigh.

I am pretty sure I could have stuck with Daypack Data and never heard from 37Signals' lawyers. We don't compete at all. But it's okay. While "Daypack" is great as a name for an iPhone app, I always thought it was a bit lightweight for what we do anyway. As I said five weeks ago ("What's in a name?"), the connotations of rucksack are much sturdier. That's a better fit with our mission. We don't just build databases you can carry your lunch in, we build databases that will carry everything you need to succeed in battle. So to speak.

And I rethought the word "data." We don't sell data and we don't do data processing. We're a technology solution firm, selling tools that allow you to manage and process your own data. So "Technology" is a better description of our field. Plus, we're in Texas. So "Texnology" seems like a clever secondary descriptor.


How do you pronounce it? I actually don't expect people to say it out loud very often, but I hereby declare that the correct, proper and officially sanctioned pronunciation is "TEK-nology" (not "TEX-").

That third letter is the Greek letter chi (khi), which gets transliterated in English as "ch" or "kh". It is in fact the character used in the word tekhnos "craft" which is the root in "technology".


This use of "tex" for "tech" is not at all original. If you're a typesetter you probably are familiar with TeX, the typesetting language, or LaTeX, the typesetting program. They are pronounced tek and latek respectively.

The fact that "tex" makes you think of the great Lone Star State is, well, just a bonus.


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