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Comment by dbreunig | Hacker News Reader

As an employee at an ad agency, I completely agree. (I mean JooJoo? Really?)

Perhaps I wrote that sentence a bit odd, but I don't mean to imply myself that this is what happened. The 'idea' central in this story simply fits similar tropes and themes I see on HN all the time. And you're right, the up-votes verify this.

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FusionPad or Fusion Tablet would have been fine. Neither are already being used for anything that i could see.

JooJoo is pronounced "joujou" in French, which is the diminutive form of "jouet", a toy. This form is only used when referring to the toys of little kids up to 7 year old. $500 for a little kid toy? Not for me, sorry.

They are definitely missing the TechCrunch ad agency now to not make such a basic check.

it also is Cantonese slang for penis

The screen is 12 inches. I suddenly feel... small.

That same french term became synonymous with supernatural fetishism in the US (via west african slaves) and was turned into "juju", which is almost always preceded by the word "bad" as another way of saying bad luck or a feeling of impending doom....

In Spain it was introduced by Tarzan films.

It's a little kid's toy because the name sounds a bit like the French word for little kid's toy, so you won't buy one?

Did you buy an Acer Ferrari laptop because you thought it was really a Ferrari sports car?

What a daft reason for not buying one.

The name sounds _exactly_ like 'little kid's toy' in French, so, indeed, it follows that it will carry those connotations to French speaking people (you're not one, I'm guessing). Shakespeare may have found a rose by another name smelling just as sweet, but in the centuries since his time we've learned that varieties called 'poo-poo' just don't sell at the garden center.

Not exactly the same. An English speaker would pronounce d-sounds before the js in "JooJoo" that wouldn't be there in the French "joujou".

The 'Wii' sold OK in English speaking markets so I don't see what the problem is.

Nintendo also has a lot more marketing to back up their choice of name.

Ha - I'd thought this was smart. We expect Japanese things to be a bit oddball by our standard, and this delivered.

The Chevy Nova completely flopped in Spanish speaking countries, primarily because in Spanish, "Nova" means "no go".

No, it didn't: http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp

Whoops! Thanks for the re-education.

But there were some other cars that had their names changed, like the "Pagero", that sounds like someone that frequently masturbates :-)

That's an urban legend, kind of like saying a dinette set called "Notable" would flop in English speaking countries because we would assume it has "no table".

Here's the snopes: http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp

Same way with softimage back in the day. It is pronounced softimazh, but it took bazillion of dead trees and marketing to explain to users how it is pronounced. You're doing something wrong if you need to use dictionary explanation in your marketing material imo.

they don't even own joojoo.com, it's some asian language site.

thejoojoo.com

Which is just lazy, terrible marketing. If you don't own the most obvious domain, do not use it as the name of your product.

If I go to joojoo.com and don't find what I'm looking for, there's not a chance in hell I'm going to start iterating through other possibilities. I'm either going to hit up Google or give up.

It worked for a while for dropbox :)

That was a great recovery for dropbox - but note that at the end of the day they still needed dropbox.com. This isn't to say that you can't succeed despite a crappy domain name, but rather that when you haven't even locked down your brand yet, why commit to something that you can't secure the domain for?

You're missing the fact that most people use Google as their 'location bar' and not the actual location bar. People literally do a Google search on Yahoo.com to get to Yahoo's site.

And in Chrome they're the same thing

Folks who search for the term "yahoo" at google.com to get to yahoo probably don't use Chrome.

Also in IE7 (maybe IE7 onwards)

Seriously! I know this moron who named his site Facebook but hosted it at thefacebook.com!

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