Aloha-hulu-wiki-waki is the Hawaiian word for branding fads

Posted on Wednesday, August 29, 2007 by Rex Hammock

Observation #1: The page about Hulu.com on Mahalo.com will be the Mahalo-hulu page. In other words, are Hawaiian-ish “wiki”-sounding words on their way to replacing dropped-vowel spelling as the new trend in branding web-services?

Observation #2: If Newscorp/Universal didn’t purchase Hula.com, they’ve just added a zero or two to the value of that domain name.

Observation #3: Is it a trend story that people hang stupid names on Internet startups? Stupid names for web-stuff is old skool.

Later: TechCrunch discovers some translations for “hulu,” including “butt” in Indonesian and “cease and desist” in Swahili.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...

About Rex Hammock

Founder/ceo of Hammock Inc., the content marketing and custom media services company based in Nashville, Tenn.
This entry was posted in observation and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.
  • http://www.geise.com PXLated

    It all started with “Akamai” didn’t it?
    mahalo and hulu are just late to the party ;-)

  • Hudge

    Wela ka hao!

  • http://www.smallbizsurvival.com Small Town Entrepreneur Becky McCray

    So the irony is that the trend is going from no vowels to bunches of extra vowels.

  • http://www.webomatica.com/wordpress/ Webomatica

    As someone who grew up in Hawaii – “Hulu” also recalls “Honolulu” or the “hula”. Personally I don’t care for these Hawaiianifacation Web 2.0 names. Hawaiian words can be very long and confusing: “kealakeakua” – “humuhumunukunukuapuaa” (a fish) I’d like to see someone name their company that!

  • http://caranita.blogspot.com lenje

    i have to make a correction here. “hulu” in indonesian means “the end”. i don’t remember if anyone ever uses it as a synonim for “butt”, not even as a slang. sorry :) )