Nintendo has also clearly won the PR war. While everyone initially ridiculed Nintendo for its choice of name, the Wii brand has proven to be a bonanza for the media in terms of generating clever headlines. The puns have continued to flow thick and fast. Coining the term Wiimote for the Wii controller demonstrates what a great choice of name Wii turned out to be.

Wii takes first round from PS3, eleven rounds to go

http://origamiproject.com/blogs/team_blog/archive/2006/03/09/19.aspx

The buzz started when the “leaked” video featuring device was discovered, however, Microsoft claims this was not staged:

Myth #2, we leaked the Origami video to create more hype. I can guarantee you that the discovery of the Origami video created by Digital Kitchen was completely unexpected. No one at Microsoft even knew that video was publicly available until someone posted it after finding it by doing an Internet search.

Anyway, the story makes an interesting case study of the viral marketing.

When the device was finally unveiled at Cebit, it turned out to be a smaller version of Tablet PC:

In the meantime, quite interesting “Origami” turned into a dull, but not unexpected given Microsoft’s record in (un)inspiring naming, “UMPC” for “Ultra Mobile PC”.

Not that the product itself is much more exciting than the name – it is reported to have a battery life up to 3 hours and cost around 1000$; why it would be better than the smartphones, PDAs and portable game consoles already on the market is anyone’s guess.

While I’m still unsure about the best name for this site, I decided that the idea of virtuous cycle is the one so broad, that it will be able to cover whatever I will write here.

I plan to revisit my original inspiration about the concept and devote a separate article to describe it. Sadly, it will have to wait, as technical details kept me from doing it right away.

Along with giving this site a name I changed the layout as well. This time I avoided do-it-yourself trap and used a theme developed by Fredrik Fahlstad instead.

Nonetheless, it still took an awful amount of time to switch. The rewrite rules gave me some headache and SPGM (gallery script) integration was a pain, as usual. As a result I have to live with having all the content starting with blog/ instead of the root domain, but I guess it doesn’t make so much difference.

I could use some logo for the new name… Another weekend, maybe:)

I would forget, screenshot of the previous design (which I developed myself) is available here for comparison.