at the risk of sounding ignorant, how the heck are people supposed to pronounce your product name? in fact, how do you even talk about your product verbally with others?
Bee-vee-cup, but here's the thing - in two years of it being in beta this has never come up as a real issue. I guess this can impede a word of (physical) mouth to a degree, but the assumption here is that few people are going to need to actually pronouce the name.
Consider Dribbble, Forrst or even XKCD - having an immediately obvious phonetic form does not appear to be a firm requirement for the name as long as its predominant usage is online.
> Consider Dribbble, Forrst or even XKCD - having an immediately obvious phonetic form does not appear to be a firm requirement for the name as long as its predominant usage is online.
I'm not sure how your examples there help you at all. Each of them have clear pronunciation: dribble, forest, XKCD each letter spelled out.
bee-vee-cup is not intuitive at all. If you show the logo to me I would have guessed "Backup" with an inverted capital A.
Examples don't mean to help, they were meant to illustrate the point that followed. The ease of pronunciation and the ability to spell the name from its audible form are not all that important in the online context. This is a conjecture, not a fact, but based on what I've seen so far it appears to be a valid one.
Moreover that stumble that your brain does when seeing it for the first time, it makes the name memorable. Compare to something like "Super Backup" - fine, easy flowing name, all clear. A week passes, and what do you remember? Was it a "super" or an "ultra backup"? Now imagine it was called "Duper Backup" - the same thing as with Bvckup, this quirk makes it more memorable and in the end that's what counts.
I have to put a disclaimer here though :) I have rather unconventional views of what makes or breaks the logos and names. I got flamed more than once for these views on Logopond and Typophile, but I still firmly believe that a small quirk in the name goes a long way. See, for example, http://dribbble.com/shots/92904-Puzzle
The name is alright, although personally I pronounce it bvvvkup in my head rather than bee-vee-ckup, but the point is that it's memorable. Explaining it over the phone to someone might be harder.
The logo is a miss though imho, I honestly thought it was an upside A as well. You could probably rectify it without losing the original concept though, for example: http://i.imgur.com/u0z2X.jpg
Yep, or akin to Bvlgari... which is what helped turning Backupus Vulgaris into Bvckup. But in the end I had to keep a safe distance from #uckup for obvious reasons.
