The origin of the name LOKAD

Joannes Vermorel

There is an interesting article about the 10 company name types on The Name Inspector. Based on their typology, you might think that Lokad is a made-up word. Well, the reality is a bit more complicated.

Lokad was initially chosen as a blend of Local + Advertising = Lokad. The blend was also including a misspelling due to some obscure domain name availability issue.

• Local advertising was a project started (and terminated) in 2005 with the CEO of a small company named Next Frontier Innovation.
• The idea was to use TFT screens to display local ads (like in a waiting queue for a movie theater). We also had several ideas to directly measure the ROI of the displayed ads.
• After two weeks of work, we discovered a few patents that had been filled by Sony one year before. Unfortunately for us, those patents where covering most of our ideas for this project.
• Conclusion: our ideas weren’t bad, yet we were too late since Sony was already holding the intellectual property.

Then there was a second project named Time-series forecasting. After the cancellation of the local advertising project, I have been looking for a great branding name for the forecasting project. Yet, I did not found any domain name convincing enough and short enough in my opinion. Thus, I finally decided to recycle LOKAD.COM for the cause of the time-series forecasting.