Many of you would’ve seen the news about the last multiplication to our team, Koushik. Those who haven’t, start following us on Facebook immediately.  Here comes the exponent to our team now.

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Meet Kingsley. He has 14 years of experience leading significant product efforts at salesforce.com, Digital Chocolate, and Bank of New York Mellon (bio). More importantly, he’s been a friend of Ideophone, early backer, and an investor for a long time now. We realised that his skills and experience would help us move to the next big orbit and cajoled him to be our Chief Marketing Officer. He’ll drive our product positioning, marketing, and business development. In short, as the talker, he puts the phone in Ideophone.
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A lot of people, well, at least, a few asked about our product names. So, here’s the story.

When we did our digital metering app, we focussed on Bangalore. So, naming the app in Kannada felt right. But, Bangalore has large populations of speakers of other languages too. While scouting for options, I happened to read about ideophones, words that “sound like what they mean” or, as Wikipedia says “words used by speakers to evoke a vivid impression of certain sensation or sensory perceptions, e.g. smell, color, shape, sound, action, or movement.” It sounded like a neat idea to name the app with an ideophone. It’ll evoke the same impression in people speaking different languages, right?

Given that the bulk of the Bangalore population speaks some Dravidian language or other, the choice fell on Suruk, which connoted diligence, speed, sharpness etc. signifying what Suruk does. And, it helped that www.suruk.com was available. It was nice also because, between us, we spoke Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada (apart from English and Hindi). We picked Ideophone as the name of the company and thought that we’ll name each of our apps and services with an ideophone.

As for SOS app, it was difficult to call it anything other than SOS itself. We excused ourselves saying that, if Morse code was a language, SOS would be an ideophone in that language. So much of retrofitting.

Pika (Photo by Alastair Rae)

Then came our railway wakeup alarm service. We were looking at numerous ideophones and chanced upon Pika, a Belarusian and Himalayan rodent that alerts other animals with a characteristic sound ‘pika’ (audio). What a linguistically and ecologically fitting find! But, we realised that most people pronounce pika as peeka as well as that the rodent is everywhere in search results. So, we called it Pyka. Don’t know from where we’ll pick the name for our future products, but http://ideophone.org/ would be one place where we’ll look at.

I’m sure there would be several interesting stories behind naming products. If you know of any, please share it in the comments.

Update: Mark Dingemanse (http://www.mpi.nl/people/dingemanse-mark), a linguist from Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics and expert on Ideophones, likes our naming and has written a blog post at http://ideophone.org/ideophones-around-the-web-ideophones-and-product-naming/. Thanks Mark.

We’re pleased to present to you, Pyka, your very own wake up caller. Are you supposed to get down in an ungodly (or unevolutionary or unutilitarian or whatever) hour at a railway station? You don’t want to wake up hours before the train chugs to your destination and sit in the lower berth with your neck against the middle berth laden with a happily-snoring uncle, no? Then, do the smart thing.
And, SleepWell™.
For more details and the obligatory disclaimer that we’re in beta mode and are not responsible for acts or otherwise of god, network, cloud, or Python, please visit www.pyka.in. You can watch a cool video too there. Thanks to all the friends, Ammas, Appas, thammudus, Achans, machans, and chechis who tested Pyka and helped us fix a number of usability issues.

Brought to you on the rails from the clouds, quite literally.

Sundar and Sandeep onboard JetLite S2 blah and Anenth on the ground.

When we started with Suruk, we ran an email survey with the help of some Christ College students and found that the top 3 problems faced by auto commuters were meter-tampering, rude drivers, and personal safety issues. So, we built a digital meter, a provision to share drivers’ conduct (good as well as bad), and to press an emergency button in case of risk. A senior person in Nokia saw our app and observed that the last option can be a standalone application because it won’t be buried in the menu when someone needs it as well as because it’s applicable in more scenarios. That’s how our One Touch SOS was seeded!

It was also our first paid app on Ovi store and our first foray into Android. Most recently, we’ve also launched it for Windows Phone 7 users. SOS also became a premium app on Aircel PocketApps as well. Here are some usage stats below to compare our reach in Ovi (paid) and Android (free).

SOS Ovi Pie	SOS Android Version Breakdown
SOS Android Country Pie	SOS Device Pie

Thanks to the prod by Movilzona about not releasing a Spanish version, we tried to localise our SOS app in Spanish. While looking at professional translation for Spanish, I asked my friend Chander if he could help with the German translation. He went beyond that, and got his translation brushed up by his friend, Johannes. As a bonus, he also got a Spanish translation from his friend, Barbara. Thanks to all of them, we released SOS in 3 languages on Ovi. We’re crowdsourcing French translations at Get Localization. Please lend a word or two if you know French.