I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.

Corporate Blogging
Posted by Rod in Blogging, TechBiz at 3:07 am on Saturday, 13 January 2007

Thanks for all the comments on the iPhone post. Great discussion.

Lots of interesting points but I thought this was worthy of a Post. Cisco General Council Mark Chandler blogs directly on the Trade Mark issue. Having the General Council blog I think is a new point in Blogging history.

Update on Cisco’s iPhone Trade Mark

I love this hook …

At MacWorld, Apple discussed the patents pending on their new phone technology. They clearly seem to value intellectual property. If the tables were turned, do you think Apple would allow someone to blatantly infringe on their rights? How would Apple react if someone launched a product called iPod but claimed it was ok to use the name because it used a different video format? Would that be ok? We know the answer – Apple is a very aggressive enforcer of their trademark rights. And that needs to be a two-way street.

Of course this could be part of the Steve Jobs ‘the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about’ strategy - before the name is changed to the ApplePhone.

The point of this post however is: all companies should have a blogging strategy. It may start as a feel good marketing tool, but what a direct way to get your message out when unexpected circumstances occur.

Trackback uri |

Comments(7)

    Comment by Russell Brown at 9:26 am on 13 January 2007

    Good use of the medium by Cisco. And no, not what Apple would do.

    It’s worth noting that Apple has been quietly applying for iPhone trademarks in a string of countries for a while now: Australia, Canada, Britain, Singapore, the European Union and - in September - New Zealand. So maybe they’re not going to give up on the name …




    Comment by Phil Cockfield at 10:27 am on 13 January 2007

    Cringely offers some compelling discussion around this strategy. He believes it’s almost certainly a free-PR play. Theory being they named Apple TV inconsistently in this way (away from iTV) to provide precedent for a fallback position of “Apple Phone” if need be. There is a small company with the iTV tradmark, a company they could have bought in a weekend’s earnings from iTunes - however they chose not to do that and entirely renamed the product….yet at the same time took on Cisco (who have more money that Apple) over the iPhone name. All points to good PR. I mean, here we are talking about it!




    Comment by Juha at 11:03 am on 13 January 2007

    The have indeed registered it around the world… is it too late to snag MacPhone?




    Comment by Juha at 11:03 am on 13 January 2007

    Doh, should read “they” up there as in “Apple” which is really singular I suppose.




    Comment by robin at 6:01 pm on 13 January 2007

    http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=236

    Hmmm.

    Anyway, it might be a while before the infrastructure to use the iPhone properly in NZ is there. Right now it just isn’t.




    Comment by Michael Davies at 1:45 am on 15 January 2007

    Rod, you might want to check this out: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=236

    It seems that Cisco may well have lost the rights to the iPhone trademark, and that it is at best being disingenuous about its continuing use.

    All the best, Michael




    Comment by Don Christie at 1:03 pm on 15 January 2007

    “The have indeed registered it around the world… is it too late to snag MacPhone? ”

    For tha sake of accuracy, is should surely be “Big MacPhone” they would want to snag…