The Ruckus Room

The Face of Fast

Don't know if you saw this.

We were just named to Fast Company's 2006 Fast 50 list.  And it wasn't easy.

This is their 10th anniversary issue, and they were looking ahead 10 years to try and see what people, technologies, products and companies would have the biggest impact – though we haven’t heard of a lot of the companies they picked (come to think of it they probably have never heard of us either). And what an honor it is to be cast in the same spotlight as Bill Gates, Terry Semel of Yahoo and Bill Clinton (kind of cool to see him on the list, we must say...).  But it was no easy task to get the nod.

They even sent an editor (a different one from the one we'd been talking to) to our demo suite at CES to make sure we were “for real and our stuff really worked” (and it did…at least while he was looking).  These guys do an excruciating amount of due diligence and are religious about who they pick and why. And man...can these guys write.

We're big fans of future-looking, crystal ball gazing as well as future facts. We think this whole issue of how consumers are going to move all this multimedia (IP-wrapped) content throughout their homes is a big thing. Location-free TV (more on that soon). We're betting on “smart Wi-Fi” as the defacto way to do it.

Now, so is Fast Company :)

Branding and the Name Game

Ever tried naming (or renaming) a company? Don't.

Aside from our CEO, we get asked a LOT about our name: Ruckus Wireless. Honestly? It was the biggest pain in the arse thing we’ve ever done (sorry for the long diatribe of a post).

Employees take the name of their company so personally because they have to tell their friends where they work – it’s sort of like a family thing or naming your offspring. Most of our employees (and their significant others) hated the name Ruckus (many still do) for myriad reasons. All you need to do is take the “R” and try replacing it with some other letters and you’ll quickly find one really good reason.

While some people might react emotionally and negatively, they react. This is hugely important for a brand. If your name doesn't elicit an emotional reaction, you've lost an opportunity to gain mindshare. Even if people react with a "Ruckus?!?"...they'll always follow that with a "what do you do?" At this point, you have accomplished the single most difficult achievement in marketing...a voluntarily captive audience.

Before we introduced our revolutionary, next generation, state-of-the-art, ground-breaking, innovative, cost-effective, user-friendly new smart Wi-Fi system, we were known as Video54. This name was the perfect way to describe what we were building – a Wi-Fi system optimized to deliver real-time video over 802.11g (that operates at 54 Mbps theoretically). Engineers usually like to name things that functionally describe what their company does because it’s efficient and precisely accurate communications (why not?).

But we felt it was too limiting, not fun enough, didn’t have our irreverent attitude and didn’t convey how we were going to shake up the market. So we went looking. And looking.   

We solicited the help of a firm called (A Hundred Monkeys) who helped us (immensely) in focusing on what a brand really is, what it isn't and its strategic importance (in the consumer world where cut-throat commoditization thrives and margins don't, branding is everything...just have an Apple).

Building a brand is an art, not a science. But when you’re dealing with scientists (our company is full of them) you quickly learn that you need to have a logical reason and explanation for everything (but this is a good thing).

Branding isn’t a company logo, name or corporate colors. It’s the perception or personality of your company. It’s what you stand for in the market or at least what people THINK you stand for - from the way you answer the phones, to how well your product performs, to the clothes employees wear in the tradeshow booth. Ultimately people, no matter what they are buying, want to buy from other people, not some faceless company. They want a relationship, not a transaction.

But names are the first place people seem to start. Ultimately your company name should tell a story or reflect something about who you are. See our story here.

Obviously some of the best brands don’t have logical names. Look at a name like Virgin Airlines. Who’d want to fly on an airline that’s never done it before. Or Yahoo! Or Google. You like those names now but if they weren’t successful you’d blame it on a stupid name. Here are some of the names that we didn’t pick:

• Zubi, Omnivore, Haywire,Straightaway, And how!, Open Road, Popover, Runabout, Octopus, Hubbub, OpenGo, Glint, Wide Eyes, Thataway, Floating City, Snapdragon, Skycastle, Shorthand, Tune, VividWhite, and Sincera.

In the end, we liked Ruckus (it came from a Mensa-smart friend, Brad Day, who was procreated to be creative). We liked it because it was a strong word that connotes activity, commotion, causing a scene. And that’s precisely what were doing in the market for home networks – popularizing a technology (Wi-Fi) that pretty much everyone has given up on to be reliable enough to stream IP-based video (read TV) over.

So Ruckus it is. I’ll just have to live with the fact that now I’m known at work by my peers as the “mother rucker.”

Sometimes Death is a Good Thing

The death of analog TV, now a foregone conclusion in the U.S., is going to make millions of TV viewers very happy, but very frustrated.

Despite the headlines that surround IPTV, Google video, and all these cool shows you can now download to your video iPOD over the Internet, many people don’t realize that digital TV is here now, for free – over the air.

People have largely overlooked that this “free to air” digital broadcasting could be a big time, big deal market (even though only 15 to 20 percent of consumers today get TV signals terrestrially).  So does this mark a return to rabbit ear antennas for TVs?  Maybe, maybe not.  Here’s some context:

The government (Congress and the FCC) has mandated that by February 17, 2009, analog TV broadcasts end and that all TVs come equipped with a digital ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) tuners.  They have also freed (for billions of potential profit...some say north of $10B) the 700 MHz analog band which should make broadband networks cheaper and easier to deploy (cuz the lower frequency radio waves propagate farther and go through obstacles better).

Meanwhile TV stations (right now) around the country are transmitting digital TV (DTV) and HDTV.  AntennaWeb will even tell you where the actual towers are located and give you a list of all the digital broadcast channels in your area. And TitanTV can tell you what HD programs are available in your area.

That’s great, but receiving these digital signals and moving them around your home is still a big pain in the rumpus (that was another choice we had for our company name – more on that soon). Directional antennas that self-tune (like we have but ours are used for Wi-Fi today) are perfect for this and basically automate the process.

Another problem is that these digital signals aren’t wrapped in IP.  IP encapsulation makes it easier to move stuff around the home because the digital information now has addressing. So two things are clear:

1. there will need to be special antennas or antenna technology that automatically tunes to find the best signal so the digital TV signal looks as good delivered as sent and
2. there will need to be some sort of IP encapsulation (read Sling-like) device that makes it easier for consumers to move this stuff around their homes.

Once that happens….who needs cable?  J