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.
August 29th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
It all started with “Akamai” didn’t it?
mahalo and hulu are just late to the party
August 29th, 2007 at 6:54 pm
Wela ka hao!
August 30th, 2007 at 1:42 pm
So the irony is that the trend is going from no vowels to bunches of extra vowels.
August 30th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
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!
January 28th, 2008 at 1:20 am
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 :))