July 30, 2010
Chroma Tickets is now Tixato!
My friends, there’s this funny place in America called the “United States Patent and Trademark Office”.
It’s a place you should never venture, but if you must venture, be sure to count among your party a Qualified Attorney.
Here we’ve been, working our way through 103-degree heat waves in Baltimore, pushing hard into the final stretch, getting more and more excited about how it’s all shaping up, when we get news from the legal frontline:
“ABORT! Your plan to file a trademark on Chroma Tickets has been derailed!”
[insert sound of screeching tires here]
What you say? We searched the hell out of that name! We didn’t see anything!
Well, what we did not see, the eyes of the Qualified Attorney did. And thus we bumped into a pending trademark for a different-but-apparently-close-enough name, for a different-but-apparently-close-enough kind of product, that is not yet officially a trademark but almost certainly will be, and boy oh boy do I not want to spend our launch party wondering how long it takes before we get sued.
So!
We put on our brainstorming hats, we fired up Domai.nr, and we started the search for a new, better, awesomer name.
It took several weeks and dozens (if not hundreds) of attempts, but finally, FINALLY we have waded through the great jungle of claimed names and discovered a very special one we are now claiming for our own:
I don’t mind telling you, I’m actually pretty happy about this. Consider, for a moment, the following properties of this lovely little word:
- It’s available in the holy trifecta of URL forms: tixato.com, tixato.net, and tixato.org
- It’s available in the super-sweet short form URL: tixa.to (Hello, Twitter-friendly URLs!)
- Speaking of Twitter, it’s available in Twitter form: http://twitter.com/tixato
- It’s not a messy two-word name, it’s just “Tixato”. Short, sweet, done.
- It’s easy to say.
- It’s easy to spell.
- It, for lack of a better word, feels right. Like it’s ticketing, but with a little magic sprinkled on top. Possibly from an Italian magician with a really killer moustache.
- It, and words spelled like it, appear ZERO times in the trademark database. Zero. No one else is using this name.
- No, really, no one else is using this name:
A reminder, I suppose, that constraints simply push us to a better place.
And now, back to work. If I can manage it in this final sprint, I’ll drop you a few screenshots as we come galloping toward the finish line.
Yes, it’s starting out simple. But damn if I don’t think you’re going to like it.
6 Comments
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[...] Since the previous post, Chroma has been renamed: Chroma Tickets is dead, long live Tixato! [...]
Sean says at
July 30, 2010 at 11:22 amAnd for the record, of those 250 results, almost all are either randomly occurring strings of characters or Google Books misreading Greek texts.
Devon Smith says at
July 30, 2010 at 2:28 pmWhich means you can also set up google alerts and not be inundated with irrelevant mentions. Congrats on the new name.
Irene R. says at
August 12, 2010 at 8:10 amThat’s a great name! How did evereyone else miss it?! Good find.
Johan Söderberg says at
August 12, 2010 at 9:46 amGreat!
For a while I thought you had dropped it all, but now
I’m anxiously looking forward to beta 1!
My gut tells me that I, for once, am betting on the right horse.
Good luck all you Tixators.
Chris says at
August 12, 2010 at 9:54 amThanks Johan! Heh–I guess I shouldn’t have waited so long before sending the first email out to the mailing list!
(I try to be really careful about not spamming people, but maybe I’m being TOO careful.)
Anyway, one thing I should point out is that our first beta will be focused mostly on a U.S. audience. Partly this is to keep things simple enough to get the first version out the door, and partly this is because our investigation with payment processors has revealed that we’ll need to build up trust with them before they’ll let us process payments outside the U.S.
However, I’m very sensitive to all the great people outside the U.S. who I really want to offer this service. The majority of the sales of our other products (QLab, etc.) are outside the U.S., so I do not want to ignore you if we can help it!
Chris says at
August 12, 2010 at 11:13 amJohan,
I was just talking to Jesse about this, and there may actually be a way that we can start supporting international customers earlier rather than later.
For the internal representation of money we’re using a ruby framework that can already represent money in different currencies. Since initially we will not be offering online sales, just box office management, then it doesn’t look like there’s a reason we couldn’t do that for different countries fairly easily.
When it comes time to actually process transactions, that will require some work, but for the initial job of just helping you to keep track of the box office, it may not be so bad.
We’ll keep thinking about how we might be able to do this.