Candytech, a Prague, Czech Republic-based marketing firm and Facebook Preferred Developer Consultant, used to run a Facebook statistics portal called Facebakers. Starting today, it will run that same portal under the banner Socialbakers.
Guess who urged the company to change the name of its product? Correct!
In case you weren’t familiar with Facebakers Socialbakers: it’s a site that provides fairly detailed Facebook statistics, such as information about the number of users in each country, including age distribution and demographics. The site also tracks brands and their activities on Facebook, top Facebook apps or advertising costs in each country.
Before you get all worked up – and there’s no guarantee that you won’t after reading the full post – Candytech co-founder Jan Rezab isn’t angry over Facebook’s request. In fact, he says he completely understands the social networking giant’s request for a name change, as Candytech’s product could indeed easily be mistaken for one of Facebook’s own services.
He adds that Facebook was completely open and accommodating about the name changing process, and in fact helped them out quite a bit with the transition.
In the blog post announcing the rebranding, it sounds something like this:
For us, having a good relationship with Facebook is very important. In cooperation with Facebook, and to avoid any confusion, we are changing our name from Facebakers to Socialbakers.
Still, I think it’s reasonable to question Facebook’s move, now that it’s near obtaining a trademark on the word ‘Face’ in the context of online communication and social networking services. It’s always easier to come across as friendly when you’re getting your way.
How long until Facebook urges another company to change its name because it contains the word ‘face’, and the target is not as cooperative as Candytech was?
Don’t we really need less lawsuits in tech, rather than more?
Socialbakers is a user friendly social media analytics platform which provides a leading global solution that allows brands to measure, compare, and contrast the success of their social media campaigns with competitive intelligence. Since 2009 Socialbakers has continuously developed social measurement tools allowing companies to measure and maximize the effectiveness of their social marketing campaigns across all major social networks. As of November 20, 2012, Socialbakers employs more than 160 highly trained staff members, dedicated to serving more than 1000...
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
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