Would you take on Apple?

Like renovating a house, managing your brand online is a journey rather than a destination. From the early days of the web where you may have just been dealing with a domain name or a piece of software, things have evolved very, very rapidly and with real consequences.

Consider Apple’s App Store. Apparently there is north of 200,000 Applications in the App Store which is currently growing at around 20,000 applications a month. Each of these has a unique name. Up until last week there was an App called Facetime. Coincidentally there was an IT consulting business in the US who had trademarked “Facetime”. But these two groups coexisted happily as it wasn’t considered that the App infringed the trademark.

However, Apple wanted to use the label Facetime for the new Video conferencing facility on the iPhone 4, so they purchased the Facetime trademark from Facetime Consulting.

They then immediately advised the owners of the Facetime App that:

“We received notice from the trademark owner of FACETIME who has confirmed their ownership of registrations for FACETIME in the US and other countries.

Accordingly, please remove your application from the App Store and change the name of your application.”

The result was the Facetime App was removed last week, to make way for Apple’s new Facetime functionality.

Really, who is going to argue with Apple?

To read more Brendan Lewis blogs, click here.

Brendan Lewis is a serial technology entrepreneur having founded: Ideas Lighting, Carradale Media, Edion, Verve IT, The Churchill Club, Flinders Pacific and L2i Technology Advisory. He has set up businesses for others in Romania, Indonesia and Vietnam. Qualified in IT and Accounting, he has also spent time running an Advertising agency and as a Cavalry Officer with the Australian Army Reserve.