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This Week in Startups: Gavin explains the fundamentals of Bitcoin
This Week in Startups: Who is Satoshi, the mysterious bitcoin founder?
This Week in Startups: The million-dollar bitcoin question: Can the system be hacked?
This Week in Startups: Jason sets his software to generate bitcoins and Gavin explains why that’s a bad idea

Understanding Deflationary spiral

FBI, Federal Bureau of Investigation, that’s an acronym, right?  Depends who you ask.  Since it’s pronounced “F-B-I” and not something like, “fibee” some say that’s not an acronym but instead an initialism.  An acronym is a word, such as NATO.

People in telecom always joke about the industry having too many TLAs, Three Letter Acronyms.  That makes a lot more sense to me now that I know the word acronym was created at Bell Labs in 1943.  Everything is AT&T is abbreviated. It’s to the point now where many acronyms have two or three meanings within the company.

Ever get annoyed when someone says “ATM Machine” or “PIN Number” because the last word is redundant? Apparently this is called RAS Syndrome or  ”redundant acronym syndrome syndrome”.

Then there’s the Recursive Acronym. This is an acronym that refers to itself. With a couple of notable exceptions like Saab (Saab Automobile Aktiebolaget) these are almost always computer related. Programmers always think it’s clever. I think I first came across this with GNU (GNU’s Not Unix). PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is another example. These may also be called Macronyms.

Nested Acronyms call other acronyms. IBM POWER is a great example. It expands out to International Business Machines Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC. But RISC is an acronym. So it expands one more time to International Business Machines Performance Optimization With Enhanced Reduced Instruction Set Computing.

If you’ve ever had to sit through any sort of meeting with HR people and watch a PowerPoint slideshow you’ve been exposed to the Backronym. This is a sort of contrived acronym made when someone takes a perfectly good word and decides each letter needs to stand for something. An example is Amber Alert (America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response), which is really named after Amber Hagerman. You know that thing we call the Patriot Act? It’s really the USA PATRIOT Act, or Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.

False acronyms are just what they sound like. Fuck doesn’t stand for  ”for unlawful carnal knowledge”, “fornication under consent of the king”, or anything else for that matter.

And finally there’s the Orphan Initialism or Acronymization, sometimes called a kind of Pseudo-acronym. These are often seen when companies or organizations that are typically known by an acronym drop all the words and change their name to the acronym. At that point the letters no longer stand for anything. KFC isn’t Kentucky Fried Chicken, it’s just KFC. 3M dropped Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, AARP dropped American Association of Retired Persons, and ESPN dropped Entertainment and Sports Programming Network. Even SAT, formerly Scholastic Assessment Test, formerly Scholastic Aptitude Test, doesn’t stand for anything nowadays.

Maya Gallo: [Nina comes wearing casual wear] Nina, look at you!
Nina Van Horn: You’ll never guess who I met last night. J. Crew!
Maya Gallo: Huh?
Nina Van Horn: Yes, Maya, there is a J. Crew. And he helped me rediscover the true spirit of casual wear. I walked to work, and I was warm and comfortable in a way I haven’t felt since I was a little girl.
Maya Gallo: But…
Nina Van Horn: I know you don’t believe me, but J. Crew lives inside each and every one of us.
Maya Gallo: Nina, I called the company, and you were right. There is no J. Crew. There never was. He doesn’t exist.
Nina Van Horn: Then who the hell did I sleep with last night?

Of course there is a company called J. Crew.  A rather big one – 12,000 employees, $1.5B in revenues, over 300 stores.

Remember J. Peterman from Seinfeld? He was Elaine’s boss and ran a clothing company based in New York that parodied J. Crew. The character was played by John O’Hurley.

Well there is a clothing company called The J. Peterman Company (although it’s based in Lexington, Kentucky, not New York City) and it was founded by a J. Peterman. Actor John O’Hurley is an investor in the company.

A programmer writes a bit of software and offers it for sale for $5. When they reach 5,000 sales they release the source code under a GPL-like license and the product becomes free.

The programmer makes $25,000 for their effort, early adopters pay a small premium, everyone benefits from the new free software. The community decides as a group if they want to buy the source code.

Does anything like this already exist?

This is classic Wal-Mart Effect.

If you know nothing about maintaining a mower, Wal-Mart has helped make that ignorance irrelevant: At $99.96, $122.00, or even $138.00, the lawn mowers at Wal-Mart are cheap enough to be disposable. Use one for a season, store it, and if you can’t start it the next spring (Wal-Mart won’t help you out with that), put it at the curb and go buy another one.  That kind of pricing changes not he just the economics at the low end of the lawn-mower market, it changes expectations of customers throughout the market.  Why would you buy a walk-behind mower from Snapper that costs $519.00?

When an event winds down on Saturday (or Sunday) evening most grapplers head home with another tournament behind them.  For us, we’re just past the halfway point.  Mats have to be returned home.  Things we rented like the truck, PA, tables, chairs, etc have to be returned.  Results (full brackets) have to be entered into the computer and uploaded to the web.  Our website has to be updated.  There may be customer service issues to resolve.  There’s accounting to do, and a staff to pay.  The work continues for several days.

Of course, there’s always something to do to at US Grappling, not just before and after events.  Event planning may begin as early as a year before the event. And beyond the events there are constant discussions about rules, referee certification, pricing, merchandise, video, and the web.  The work of US Grappling never ends.

Here’s my question – is this stuff of interest to competitors?  Would you want to read a separate blog, written by the staff of US Grappling, explaining what we’re putting in to our events, what we’re planning, what we’re thinking about, etc?

It would be hosted over on usgrappling.us, and could also serve as an feedback mechanism for grapplers. We’re constantly seeking feedback (good and bad) from the competitors and spectators.

Leave a comment here if you think this is something you’d want to read.

How many times do buy something only to have it break after a couple of dozen uses, then replace it with the same brand, over and over.  Normally you break that cycle and move on to a different brand, right?  Yet somehow Oster gets a pass here.  Most people only use their blender a couple of times a year, and typically to crush ice.  A blender can only crush but so much ice before it gives up the ghost.  I guess we just accept that crushing ice is a lot to ask, and you’re going to have to replace them from time to time.  After a long night of crushing ice for margaritas my dead Osterizer invariably gets replaced with another Osterizer.

If you’ve ever canned food before you know who makes Mason jars.  I’m sure there are lots of companies, yet it’s the cursive Ball logo that just popped in your head.  If not, you must have thought of Kerr.

When I need kitchen matches I get Diamond.  I don’t think I’ve ever bought any other type.  Diamond makes other things, like lighters and plastic cutlery, but it’s the Strike Anywhere matches that I always associated them with.

If I asked my poker playing friends about playing cards a bunch of brands would come to mind – Bicycle, Bee, Aviator, Hoyle – but they are all brands of the United States Playing Card Company.

If someone calls you Mr. (Something) you must be pretty darn good at it.  Or at least that’s what we should believe.  Personally I’ve never had much luck with Mr. Coffee’s pots, but that’s great marketing.  And they did invent the automatic drip coffeemaker afterall.   What ever happened to Mrs. Tea? Now they make Mr. Coffee Iced Tea Makers. Why would I want Mr Coffee to make my tea?

I don’t know anything about fishing, but I know who makes fishing line – Stren. They were the first to make nylon fishing line and they’re still the number one brand.  DuPont created Stren 2 decades after they invented nylon. Now Stren is part of a family of other fishing products with names I’m familiar with such as Abu Garcia and Ugly Stik.

Owning any one of these brands would be a great way to make money.  Owning every one of these brands, as the Jarden Corporation of Rye, New York does is an even better way to make money.  But Jarden knows the very best way to make money – they make money.  Jarden supplies the United States Mint and the Royal Canadian Mint with copper plated zinc penny blanks, as well as plated steel and zinc for coinage in other markets.

Now that’s making money.

Band-Aid, Coke, Kleenex, Saran Wrap, Q-tips, Scotch tape, and Xerox are some of the ones we hear all the time.  We’re mostly aware that they are brands but we use the words generically anyway.  In most cases this is because that brand either invented the product or simply owned the market for as long we we can remember.

Here’s a few more.  Some may surprise you.

• Crock-pot is a trademark of Rival/Sunbeam.
• Heroin & Aspirin were both once Bayer trademarks.  In fact, outside of the US Aspirin is still a Bayer trademark.
• Dumpster is a bit of confusing story.  The word is used generically now and all the trademarks I checked were expired.  dumpter.com is a Waste Management website which uses the word dumpster extensively.  It seems that a one point there was a Dumpster brand, apparently owned by Dempster Brothers, but I think they are no more.
• Netbook is owned by Psion, but this is currently being fought out in court.  Dell and Intel are trying to get the trademark stripped and have the courts declare it a generic term.  Psion trademarked the term in 1996.
• You have never had a cup of coffee in a Styrofoam cup. There’s no such thing as a Styrofoam cup. Maybe you’ve had a drink from a cup made of molded expanded polystyrene beads, but never from the extruded polystyrene foam The Dow Chemical Company calls Styrofoam.  In fact there are no disposable products made of Styrofoam.
• If you freeze flavored water on a stick you should call it a “quiescently frozen confection” to avoid a lawsuit. Popsicle, along with Breyers, Klondike, Good Humor, and Ben & Jerry’s are owned by Unilever.
• Escalator was trademarked by the Otis Elevator Company in 1900 but they lost the trademark in a lawsuit in 1950.  The courts determined that Otis had used the word escalator as a generic descriptive term, and it was widely recognized by the public as the term for all moving stairways, regardless of the manufacturer.   It makes for an interesting case study in the development of the proprietary eponym.
• Although the device itself was invented in Sweeden by Gideon Sundback, the word Zipper was trademarked by the B. F. Goodrich Company in 1925.  If you’ve always wondered why so many of your zippers say “YKK”, that’s Yoshida Kogyo Kabushiki-gaisha, the Toyko-based world’s largest manufacturer of zippers.
• And of course, what self-respecting practitioner of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu could have this conversation with mentioning Gracie Jiu Jitsu.  I hardly ever hear the term “Gracie Jiu Jitsu” any more.  Most people say either “Brazilian Jiu Jitsu” or simply “BJJ”.  I remember when I first got in to this sport hearing that the Gracie family lost control of the name  “Gracie Jiu Jitsu” because it had become so widely recognized as the name for the sport.  I never really bothered looking in to it until today.  As it turns out Rorion Gracie does have  a trademark on the term.

Bart: Otto-Man? You’re living in a dumpster?
Otto: Ho, man, I wish. Dumpster-brand trash bins are top-of-the-line. This is just a Trash-Co waste disposal unit.

– The Simpsons  – “The Otto Show”

Name the inventors of the following items:

• Telephone
• Machine Gun
• Radio
• Automobile
• Light Bulb

Did you come up with Alexander Graham Bell, Dr. Richard Gatling, Guglielmo Marconi, Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison? Okay, let’s look at each of these:

Telephone – Everyone knows the Alexander Graham Bell story and has heard the famous line, “Mr. Watson. Come Here. I need you.” But in “The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret” Seth Shulman tells the story only real telephony geeks know – Elisha Gray was first.

Machine Gun – The Gatling gun did fire continuously, but required a person to spin a crank. Gatling guns are therefor not automatic (“machine”) guns.  The action of an automatic weapon is cycled by the previously fired round, requiring the user to simply hold the trigger (or press is repeatedly, in the case of so-called semi automatics). The first true automatic was the Maxim Gun, a recoil operated gun designed by Sir Hiram Maxim. John Browning is largely responsible for the design of modern gas operated actions.

Radio – Marconi is often called the “father of radio” and certainly was a big player in the development, but at best he has to share credit with Nikola Tesla, David E. Hughes, Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, Jagadish Chandra Bose, Alexander Stepanovich Popov, Thomas Edison, James Clerk Maxwell, Mahlon Loomis, Oliver Joseph Lodge, and William Henry Ward. Ward was in fact the first person granted a US patent in wireless telegraphy. Tesla probably has the best claim here.

Automobile – Like the radio, the car is the result of a lot of inventors working independently.  It’s probably not fair to give any one person credit for creating the car.  But one thing is clear – Henry Ford gets no credit in this department – not for inventing the car or the assembly line. In fact, Ford wasn’t even the first company to use assembly lines to manufacture cars.  That distinction belongs to Ransom Olds of the Olds Motor Vehicle Company. Although a large number of people contributed to the invention of the automobile, if you had to pick one name it would probably be Karl Benz (as in Mercedes-Benz).

Light Bulb – If you said Thomas Edison here I’m going to give you partial credit, but at the very least Sir Joseph Wilson Swan deserves equal credit. Swan had a British patent a full year before Edison’s American patent, which was essentially a copy of the Swan design.  Edison’s improvements made the bulbs last longer and made them more economically viable products.

Wake up in the morning and brush your teeth: Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush, Crest Toothpaste, Glide Floss, and rinse with some Scope. Whitestrips, anyone? Or, are those not your teeth? Maybe you Fixodent and forget it.

Shaving time: The Braun Series 7 is a good choice if you’re going electric, but if you’re going to shave in the shower you might just stick with a Gillette. I have a Gillette Mach3 Power, which conveniently came with Duracell batteries. We’ll save the Old Spice for after the shower.

Speaking of showers: You can go with the Olay body wash, or just a regular bar of soap, like Ivory or Zest. Hopefully you don’t need Head & Shoulders, so you can go with Herbal Essences for the hair. If two steps is too much work Pantene puts the shampoo and conditioner in the same bottle.

You might need to use a different shampoo if you’ve colored your hair with Clairol – I’m not sure. Then again, if you’re using Clairol you might also be using Secret, CoverGirl, Max Factor, Always, Tampax, and Clearblue Easy.

That should wrap it up for the bathroom. Oh wait, one more thing – don’t squeeze the Charmin. And somewhere in this bathroom surely there’s a box of Puffs, although I hope it’s not the kind with lotion. They’re like pre-used tissues. And as if that’s not weird enough, you can get Puffs with Vicks, too!

If there’s a baby in the house you’ve probably already changed the Pampers or Luvs by now. And while we’re taking care of little creatures, Eukanuba makes 48 different kinds of dog food, and Iams makes 42 varieties of cat food.

Before we head to the kitchen we’ll start a load of laundry: I always buy Tide, but as near as I can tell it’s all the same thing – Cheer, Era, Gain… Well, maybe except for Dreft. I add some Downy with Febreze except when I’m washing towels. The Febreze is especially important when washing gis. In the dryer I add a sheet of Bounce, but have no idea why. It’s just part of the process.

Forgot to do the dishes last night. Just like the laundry detergent, I think Dawn and Joy are pretty much the same thing. Cascade Complete goes in the machine. Use the PUR filter to get the water you’ll need for your Fibersure or Metamucil. Now just wipe the counters down with some Mr. Clean and Bounty paper towels, and maybe hit the floors with the Swiffer real quick.

Finally, breakfast time! If you turn the TV on and see As the World Turns or Guiding Light, you may have taken too much NyQuil and overslept. Better just grab some Sour Cream and Onion Pringles and hit the road. Then again, if that’s your breakfast maybe you should grab some Pepto-Bismol and Prilosec, too.

Whew! That’s enough with the inventory for now. Counting up the products we’ve encountered so far, that’s 53 by my count.

So now the question is, how many companies make those 53 brands? Of course, people who know me or read this blog already know the answer – one. How many times can a company touch a person’s life? By their own count, Procter & Gamble says 3 billion per day.