RE: Professional Courtesy :-)

Sally Khudairi (skhuda@ctp.com)
Sat, 6 Mar 1999 13:32:00 -0500


Rohit, avoid X-anything, unless you want to seem like a wannabe. Now is that
what you really really want ;-?

A chicken drumstick minus a bite would seem just a teeny bit more
appropriate than the risotto spoon, although risotto spoons are clearly so
much more chic.

Michael, I need to touch base with you as well. Yesterday I incorporated,
resigned from God-awful CTP and have narrowed down my clients down to 2 on
each coast -- the rest are waitlisted! I've got the ball rolling for the new
interactive marketing channel and have aligned a pistol of a partner to pick
up where our discussion left off. I'll be in San Fran the week of 22 March
and would love to get together if you're in town.

Man, it feels so good to be back in the saddle.

- S

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rohit Khare [SMTP:rohit@uci.edu]
> Sent: Friday, March 05, 1999 7:02 PM
> To: FoRK@xent.ICS.uci.edu; michael@mudhaus.com; connolly@w3.org
> Subject: Professional Courtesy :-)
>
> Michael (& other spectators):
>
> I've been limping along for too many years with bland monikers for my
> consulting business. Originally, it was "Rohit Khare Software", which
> wasn't used publicly. Currently, I've been using "4K Associates" for
> the ad-hoc teams I assemble for my standards-strategy consultancy
> (get it? fork -> forkay like butter-> parkay). In the long term, I
> want a flexible corporate identity at the center of a little FoRK
> 'keiretsu', especially the munchkins-vision (billions of little
> ad-hoc transceivers for the rest of the planet). And, to top it all
> off, I do have a 'brand' in FoRK, the mailing list, and XeNT, the
> hostname of my server.
>
> On top of all this, it also has to have an available domain name... sigh.
>
> So I'm taking a little daydreaming break this afternoon on the
> thought that we might chat about it sometime. In particular, I'm
> fishing for opinions on the most-far-out possibility, which is the
> xent identity.
>
> Originally, it was a spur-of-the-moment anagram of NeXT, of course,
> with a hacked logo to match. But over the years, it's been my one
> durable moniker. I pronounce it like "cent". I've managed to reserve
> xent.com, .net, and .org. But it still seems weird to me to run with
> such a geeky, off-the-cuff name.
>
> With a name like XENT, I feel there's some energy in the X part: XML,
> XTP, Xcess, Xcetera. Hey, it could be short for "XML Entertainment"
> :-) But am I right in tending towards a logotype, or should I still
> be thinking of an image? Again, flexibility: the semantic vacuum at
> the heart of xent is a good thing, in that the corporate identity is
> a pure mood, and the meaning can be filled in later.
>
> The default hypothesis, though, is 4K (4K-associates.com). Heck, I
> even got Adam & me corporate platinum AmEx cards and all with it :-)
> The idea has been to commission a proper calligraphic hiragana pun.
> For example, in India, there's a freaky tradition of writing english
> lettering with a crossbar in such a way that it looks like Hindi at
> first. So here, it would be joining the letterforms of 4 and K in a
> chop. I'm told it's close to a Chinese ideogram for 'fat', which
> would be especially choice :-)
>
> And as for FoRK itself, well, we need membership cards, which means
> we need a FoRK logo, and the mind reels at the possibilities. Well,
> my teeny design-challenged one does... my favorite visual pun for it
> would be a simple illustration of a risotto spoon, flat with a little
> notch on the side :-)
>
> Live from the RoZone,
> Rohit