Oh Romeo!

On April 2, 2008, I wrote a blog called “What’s in a name?” I talked about how we had gone ahead and chosen the name “Theo” before actually owning it and how we had fallen in love with the name. But, like Romeo and Juliet the quest to consummate our perfect love ended tragically. A lesson was learned that I’ll share – don’t pick your name until you are sure you can actually own it one day. And don’t assume that:

1. Sedo.com is ever on your side (or that they have any type of good customer service or will actually do anything for you that you cannot do on your own) or
2. That a person listing a domain for sale actually plans on ever selling that name (rather they lead you along letting you think that at a certain price point they will be satisfied and when you actually meet that price they say no and go tell someone else that they were offered $xx or in our case $xx,xxx in the past for their domain name).

But, unlike Romeo and Juliet who had the misfortune of actually carrying out their suicide pact, we, as a group, decided not to put on the black sneakers and drink the green Kool Aid. Instead, we renamed ourselves to something that makes a bit more sense than Theo, that we kind of fell in love with, and, most importantly, that we could actually buy!

There was going to be a big unveiling of the new name right here in this paragraph, but I am assuming that you have probably already looked at the new logo and maybe you even got here from the link on the web site and maybe the URL from blogspot gave it away. So, I’ll just tell you a little bit about the name and the logo.

The name is kind of logical for us. Public Chalk’s mission is to provide a real-time multimedia utility that engages your groups of friends in conversation. Basically – pick up a piece of chalk, find a blackboard, invite the friends who will be most interested in what you have to say, invite them to watch you write, let them write back.

The logo was designed by kick-ass San Francisco based Stan Zienka. You can see that the lettering is simple and upper case – just like you find on most chalk boards and the background is deep gray, not accidentally also just like a chalk board.

So, we have a name. Oh, and, while we were trying to figure out the name a lot has happened on the development side of the house. We expect to deliver release 1.0 in early August. Check back soon for the initial feature set and planned development beyond the initial release.

ETJ