Monday, March 05, 2007

Hello! What's the deal with the Apple Hello phone?

Have you seen the commercial on TV starting out with Lucille Ball answering the phone saying "hello"? It then shows a series of famous actors saying "hello" from many historical movies and television shows.

At the end, it shows the Apple Inc. (AAPL) iPhone, however I didn't see the name iPhone anywhere on the ad. Does this mean that the iPhone may be called the Hello Phone?

Let's look at the hello.com domain name. This domain name has been subject to some dispute in 2002 between Hola S.A., a Madrid based company and Hello Limited, a London based company [both publishers of Hello Magazine in Europe], and Idealab, a Pasadena, California based technology incubator. Idealab created Picasa, which was acquired by Google (GOOG) and Google now shows up as the owner of the domain. If you go to hello.com, you are brought to Google's Picasa Hello picturing sharing site which allows users to share pictures with friends without doing any uploading or making any attachments.

So the question remains, is there a connection between Apple, Google, and Hello, or is this just a bad connection?

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