Name That Zone! i/oZONE under Renovation
by Lee H. Goldberg
i/oZONE editor, Lee Goldberg, invites you to help
find a new name for i/oZONE
Whether it's your child or a piece of software, it's always exciting, and occasionally a little painful, to see something you helped create grow up and change. That's sort of what's going to be happening here at i/oZONE around the dawn of 2005 when we'll be taking on a new name, and "fine-tuning" our mission.
I usually shudder when an old tried-and-true product gets a new name, and think that most "re-branding" is a sophomoric exercise, best left to mediocre marketing managers who have nothing better to do. In this case, however, the high-speed interconnect technologies we cover here have changed and expanded so much in the nearly three years since we opened up the i/oZONE, that the name just doesn't fit anymore.
That's why I'd like to enlist your help in re-naming this ZONE.
While "I/O" was a perfectly good term to describe the relatively straightforward ways we made connections between computers and peripherals, there's been an explosion of sophisticated technologies that's changed computing, as well as many non-computing markets. Whether it's the new PCI Express and RapidIO bus technologies, SPI, OIF and QDDR chip-to-chip connections, or Bluetooth, UWB, and emerging near-field communication (NFC) wireless links, the stuff I cover in i/oZONE now goes far beyond the traditional conception of I/O. That's why I feel it's time to come up with another name that describes it better. After kicking it around for nearly a year, and running a bunch of names past friends and industry experts, I've narrowed the field down to two possibilities.
While not perfect, I think that interconnectZONE and connectivityZONE come about as close to what we're about here as anything else. But the final choice is up to you.
It's time, dear readers, to help me choose between the two names I've come up with. Please let me know if you'd rather see interconnectZONE or connectivityZONE at the top of this home page, or feel free to suggest something else that better describes what this section means to you.
I'll be taking your suggestions up through just before Christmas, and some time just after New Year you'll see the results of our informal poll right here on xxZONE, or whatever we call it then.
Comments? Questions? Other suggestions on a new name for i/oZONE?
Write me at lgoldberg@green-electronics.com.