Written By ‘The Maker’

A lot of people ask me  how did I come up with the name ‘illsheep’ and what does it mean. Well, first of all the name was inspired by the book, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” by Philip k. Dick, also the basis for the famous sci-fi thriller Blade Runner. Literally, I just changed the spelling of “Electric” to spell “Illectric”, ill being modern slang for “cool“. But, what does it mean in a greater societal context? In this day and age a lot of us are running around like sheep, we don’t know whether we are coming or going in between work and the information overload of the internet superhighway machine. Illsheep - stands for the ability to illectrify or inspire oneself enough to break away from the herd, creating innovation within and eventually for society at large.

Our recent initiatves include creating awareness for cleantech(green technology) - low carbon solutions, and fundamental problems in emerging economies such as food, water, and popuation growth. Accordingly, we hope our brand name will create more interest in these areas.

Interesting in crafting your own name for a start-up? Take a cue from some of Japan’s biggest companies: 

Posted from: Japan Times Online

By MARY SISK NOGUCHI

Fortune magazine’s list of the world’s top 500 earners for 2008 included 64 Japanese companies. The English names of these global giants are used in both the international and domestic markets. But Japanese versions of each also exist. To cook up these, the enterprises had at hand the sumptuous ingredients of written Japanese — kanji, katakana and Roman letters (romaji) — and a dash of English.

Take the name of imaging and optical giant Canon, which could be mistaken for an English family name but has its roots in a Buddhist deity. In the 1930s, the inventor of Japan’s first 35 mm focal-plane shutter camera, a devotee of 観音 (kannon, the goddess of mercy), named it “Kwannon Camera.” The company later changed the spelling to “Canon” and uses キヤ in lieu of the “correct” form キャ in the katakana version キヤノン(pronounced kyanon), avoiding empty space in the name.

Other Fortune-ranked companies have names written in both English and katakana. Tokuji Hayakawa invented a mechanical pencil in 1915, dubbing it the Ever-Ready Sharp (known in Japanese as シャーペン, shāpen). Hayakawa’s humble workshop has morphed into electronics giant Sharp (シャープ, shāpu). Shojiro Ishibashi, a maker of rubber-soled tabi (split-toe socks) in the ’30s, transposed the two kanji comprising his family name, 石 (ishi, stone) and 橋 (hashi, bridge) to create Bridgestone (ブリヂストン, burijisuton), now the world’s largest tire manufacturer.

More recently, entrepreneur Masayoshi Son used English creatively in 1981 when he named telecommunications company Softbank (ソフトバンク), with “soft” referring to software.

The name of retail giant AEON (イオングループ, iongurūpu) exudes a positive vibe with its meaning, “an infinite period of time” (more commonly spelled “eon”), and capital letters. Some AEON stores still operate under its former name, JUSCO (ジャスコ, jyasuko), an acronym for Japan United Stores Company.

Another company named with an English acronym is telecoms powerhouse NTT (Nippon Telegraph & Telephone, 日本電信電話, nippondenshindenwa). Spinoff NTT docomo (エヌ・ティ・ティ・ドコモ, enutitidokomo), the biggest mobile phone operator in Japan, chopped the first two letters off three words in the phrase “do communications over the mobile network” to craft “docomo.” “docomo” is also a cleverly used homonym for “doko mo,” (どこも), meaning “everywhere.”

The name of Nissan Motors (日産) began on the Tokyo stock market as an abbreviation of its original incarnation, Nippon Sangyou (日本産業). Nissan formerly marketed vehicles under the brand name “Datsun.” “Dat-” stood for the family names of founding members Den (D), Aoyama (A), and Takeuchi (T). “Son,” originally tacked on the end of “Dat-” (i.e., “son of DAT”), was later changed to “sun” because “son” (損) means “loss” in Japanese.

Last year, Matsushita Electric Industrial (松下電器産業, matsushita denkisangyō) renamed itself Panasonic (パナソニック, panasonikku) and is phasing out brand name National (ナショナル, nashyonaru). “PanaSonic” (i.e., “sound everywhere”) was first coined in 1955 for Matsushita’s exported audio speakers. In the same decade, Tokyo Tsūshin (東京通信) put transistor radios into the hands of millions of American teenagers and changed its name to Sony (ソニー), an ingenious combination of “sonus” (Latin for “sound”) and “sonny,” American slang for “young man.”

Toyota Motor (トヨタ自動車, toyota jidōsha), No. 1 among Japanese companies in the Fortune Global 500 ranking and No. 5 in the world, originally sold vehicles using the family name of founder Kiichiro Toyoda, written トヨダ. But in 1937, ダ (da) was changed to タ (ta): タ is visually simpler and gives トヨタ a lucky eight-stroke count.

Although companies such as トヨタ and Suzuki Motor Corporation (スズキ) write their names in katakana, conglomerates Mitsui (三井) and Sumitomo (住友), both tracing their roots back to Edo Period (1603-1867) merchants, continue to honor their founders by writing their names in kanji, as does Honda Motor (本田技研工業, hondagikenkōgyō).

The company ranked No. 1 in the Global 500, Wal-Mart, also happens to be written in kanji . . . in China, with characters meaning “rich, you and agate” to phonetically represent “wo-er-ma.” Big dreamer Sam Walton probably never envisioned in 1964 that the name of his new store in small-town Arkansas would one day be familiar to millions of people reading it in Sino-Japanese script.

Explore kanji-learning materials utilizing component analysis at www.kanjiclinic.com

Photo: GOH CHAI HIN/AFP/Getty Images

Posted from: Foreign Policy

Why English will keep America’s influence from waning.

By Ali Wyne

It’s easy to be pessimistic about the United States’ standing in the world these days. The financial crisis shamed Wall Street for reckless behavior at a time when China’s economic clout is fast rising. Leaders at the G-20 called for a multi-polar world, even as their prescriptions looked to be self-fulfilling. Even the U.S. National Intelligence Council concluded that the United States “will be less dominant” a quarter of the way into the new century in last year’s Global Trends 2025 report.

But for those who claim that the post-American world is a fait accompli, there is one big problem: The English language is winning hearts and minds faster than politics ever can. With the June 10 addition of ”noob” (a pejorative description of a newcomer to a particular task or group) to its lexicon, English will boast one million words - twice as many as Cantonese, four times as many as Spanish, and 10 times as many as French. Half the world’s people are projected to be speaking English by 2015. And so long as English is on track to become the world’s unofficial language, the United States will likely be center stage.

The stats say it all. In mid-2007, the International Herald Tribune stated that “English is spoken in some form by three times as many nonnative speakers as native speakers.” English is a first language for 400 million people, and a fluent second for between 300 and 500 million more, the IHT wrote. Add on top of that the 750 million who have studied English as a foreign language and you have well over 1 billion members of the English-speaking world. Every globally influential newspaper is either written in English or has an English-language version. The same is nearly true for science, where more than 90 percent of the world’s major journals are printed in English. With all this at stake, it’s no surprise that the global market for English-as-a-second-language training products and services is worth $50 billion (that’s more than Lithuania’s 2008 GDP).

Why the English explosion? It’s all about upward mobility. In China, America’s putative superpower replacement, learning English is considered a gateway to middle-class security; 300 million people speak it there, and another 350 million people speak it in India. According to a recent report by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, between 96 and 100 percent of people in China, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam believe children should learn English. Their goal is reflected in the more than 90 percent of Japanese elementary schools that offer English programs. Children in China start learning the language in third grade and more than 50,000 English-training centers there offer further instruction. Chris Gibson, the British Council’s director for South India, aims to have every South Indian speaking it by 2010, at which point he believes that English will be a codified world language (Penguin Books’ operations in India, meanwhile, are salivating at what they see as the world’s fastest-growing English-language market).

Asian countries aren’t alone in their anglophilia. Since 1998, Argentinean students have been required to take two hours of English per week from fourth grade through high school. That same year, Chile mandated that government-run schools begin offering English instruction starting in fifth rather than seventh grade. English is the language of choice in the classrooms of many African countries. And even continental Europe has placed growing emphasis on learning English. The Dean of MBA programs at France’s ESSEC Business School, Laurent Bibard, told The New York Times that the school is adopting English because “it’s the language for international teaching.” English, he continued, “allows students to be able to come from anyplace in the world and for our students — the French ones — to go everywhere.”

The trends suggest that English’s influence is primed to increase in the decades ahead. Consider this forecast by the Director of Asia for the McKinsey Global Institute: “By 2100, the world will go from a 7,000-language planet to a couple of hundred languages at the most…English will be the major medium of communication in many countries and the second-most prevalent in China, Japan, Korea, and much of Africa and Latin America - as it already is in most of Europe.”

Language quite literally anchors human progress - it allows children to learn, authors to write, consumers to buy, companies to produce, leaders to negotiate, people to travel, and enables just about anything else that you can imagine. Whether it’s Latin during the first century or French in the 18^th, great powers and global lingua francas tend to go together. So while the unipolar moment may be over, the growing influence of English will ensure that the United States doesn’t fade into the sunset anytime soon.

Ali Wyne is a junior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Written by David Simpson

Do you constantly wonder about what to do with your life? Well, so do I.  Anyone who knows me well can tell you that I am like 10 paths that diverge in a yellow wood to modify the famous Robert Frost poem. However, as I get older time becomes more precious so I realize I have to choose a path. No one can tell you what path to choose but I believe if you are to be happy then one must enjoy the journey down that path, if not then you are probably on the wrong path. So far I have been fortunate enough to enjoy my walk through the woods, however when it is time to choose another path it will be one that I enjoy and I am passionate about in the present.

Posted from: Stanford University’s Entrepreneurship Corner Series

Randy Komisar joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers in 2005 as a partner. For several years prior Randy has partnered with entrepreneurs creating businesses with leading edge technologies. He is a Consulting Professor of Entrepreneurship at Stanford University and author of the best-selling book The Monk and the Riddle, as well as several articles on leadership and entrepreneurship. You may find some of his advice below very useful:

A Cautionary Word on the Deferred Life Plan

Optimizing Career and Life Opportunities