“Is it Ah-zo-bot or Oh-zo-bot?” It’s a question we hear often. Until recently, more often than we wanted to admit. Why be shy about some subtle pronunciation differences, you ask? Because we’re a startup, and the world of startup names can be a pretty scary place.
Let’s start with the stereotypes. There’s the seemingly endless string of startup names ending in “ly” or “io”. You’ve got Visual.ly, Parse.ly, Put.io, and Musical.ly, to name a few. Then there’s the land of the lost vowels, where giants like Tumblr and Flickr roam.
To complicate things, your startup name needs to play well on social and lend itself to snappy hashtags. You can’t ignore it. This is 2017 after all, a time when national policy decisions get shared in the space of a tweet. Or multi-million dollar movie deals get made because of less than 140 characters.
Thankfully, the Ozobot team navigated all these early challenges with ease. Fast forward to today, and the only name problem we’ve encountered is some fun pronunciation. Hence this blog post. And this video, made to set the record straight once and for all.
That’s right, guys. Officially, it’s Oh-zo-bot, not Ah-zo-bot. Like ozone, not the Wizard of Oz. Now you might be thinking, “Wow, how embarrassing for you guys. You have to talk to people about how to say your name.” After all that talk about the significance of startup names, no less. But we’re not shy about it. In fact, we like it!
There are a few reasons for this. First, we celebrate creativity around here, including creative pronunciation. Who could get mad at the kids who made this video, for example?
Jayla and Noor can call us whatever they want, as far as we’re concerned. As long as they keep making awesome paper craft and playing with Ozobots, we’re happy.
That’s reason #1. Reason #2 that we’re embracing mispronunciation? We’re in great company. This December, the folks over at Porsche felt the need to clarify their company’s name. Apparently, things had gotten so bad that, even as an 80+ year old company at the top of high performance sports car heap, they had to release a helpful video of their own.
We feel you, Porsh. We really do. If you guys have pronunciation problems, then we’re happy to have them too.
Love,
Ozobot
