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What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

— Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

This morning I learnt through Engadget that what was known until now as Project Natal is now called Kinect for Xbox 360, as revealed just before E3 by none other than a 76-person cast of Cirque du Soleil. I had two reactions:

1. Why wasn’t I invited? :P
2. Who came up with that horrible name?!

I guess the answer to the first question is obvious: someone messed up—but, please, don’t fire him or her, I wasn’t available anyway.

The answer to the second one is tougher. Natal was a nice name—or a nice code name to be precise. Why change it?

It can’t be easy naming products for a multinational such as Microsoft. You have to take into account that you are probably going to be selling and advertising all over the world (except if you’re selling Zunes, but that’s another story.) You want your name to be catchy, easy to pronounce and, very important, to not have any special connotations in any of the locales you are doing business in. And that’s exactly the problem with “natal.”

Natal, nadal, natale, nadâl, natali, natál; all mean the same thing: Christmas. And if there’s one thing that you do not want associated with a product that you want to sell as much as possible is religion.

Kinect, on the other hand, is, as far as I know, not a word in any language, but with its obvious roots in Greek κίνηση (kínisi), smart people will still get the meaning of movement behind it. It’s also easy to remember and, aside from Australia, there’ll probably be no copyright issues with the name (and even then…)

It’s still ugly.

But Microsoft’s not known for good naming. We all know Microsoft Windows, but do you know what its relationship is to Windows Live or Windows Live Essentials? What about Windows Phone 7 Series—which got renamed to Windows Phone 7—is it the same as Windows 7? And I once head of something called Virtual Earth, which was then renamed to Live Maps (Windows Live Maps?) and I think it’s now called Bing Maps (is Live dead?) but I haven’t checked in the last 24 hours.

It sure is easy to get lost fast.

“Easy” also come to mind when I think of certain products from other companies. Have you heard of the iPod, iPhone, iPad, iMac, iLife, iWorks, …? Those are easy to remember, catchy, not words from the dictionary in any language and unlikely to cause copyright issues. (Except for the new iOS, I don’t know how they’re getting away with that one.) Sure, in the case of the Xbox, the “x” brand is already quite saturated, but that only means that there’s an opportunity to find something original.

Anyway, I wouldn’t like to have to come up with real-world marketable names for a company such as Microsoft, so I do have quite a bit of admiration for all the people involved in the process. I do hope, though, that somebody within Microsoft realises that their names do not take the client into account, and that has to change.

I already knew that Google couldn’t use the Gmail brand in Germany:

The only problem is that I’m at our Paris school right now, nowhere near Germany.

From a user experience point of view, though, the message is even more disturbing in another way. It says that I have to visit http://mail.google.com, but that’s what my address bar is showing!

I know what’s going on, but most people won’t. I guess that’s why regular users have a little trouble adopting Gmail (in my experience anyway), the service is still very tech-savvy oriented.

I was really looking forward to it because I wasn’t fan of the “blades” at all, so I obviously logged on to Xbox LIVE last Wednesday to download the New Xbox Experience (NXE).

One of the new features of the NXE is the creation of avatars, which I was kind of forced to test even though I really, really needed to sleep. Avatars are not something new; we already had Miis on the Wii for example.

On the Wii they can be used as characters for certain games, but they’re still just a few elementary shapes with a face that more or less might look like you. On the Xbox, even though I haven’t tested any games that use the avatar as a character, the 3D model itself is of excellent quality! I don’t claim to have created a clone of myself, but I think that it’s recognizable enough.

Even better, Micrsoft is all about connecting devices, software, services, your car, … so it’s just natural that your avatars can also come out of the Xbox:

• http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/(gamertag)/avatar-body.png
• http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/(gamertag)/avatarpic-l.png
• http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/(gamertag)/avatarpic-s.png

Just replace (gamertag) by your own—in my case it’s xboxMadd0 because someone had already taken madd0 :(

Download the NXE if you haven’t already and have fun sharing your avatars ;)

I had already talked about it not so long ago, tomorrow (or actually today on my watch, but let’s talk PST) November 19th, we’ll be getting the new Xbox Dashboard.

Creating avatars, streaming from Netflix, buying stuff on a computer and having the Xbox download it automatically, and accessing Community Games are just a few of the new features included.

The update is as simple as it gets, but if you’d like a walkthrough, here’s Major Nelson:

I’ve been using Gmail more and more lately for everything personal, but I was still missing the “Oulook experience” from work when it came to having, at a  glace, my mail and my future appointments.

Thanks to Google Labs’s new Google Calendar gadget this is now possible, as you can see on the screenshot on the left. You can also see that you get whatever calendars are active on your Google Calendar account, and they are color-coded, too.

Sure, my Gmail is getting a little crowded now, but keyboard navigation still works great and the “Right-side *” Labs features makes things readable (except for a couple of poorly formatted HTML newsletters), so I’m still happy.

We’ve been waiting for it impatiently—or at least I have. It was initially rumored for October, but Microsoft officially announced yesterday at TGS 2008 that the new Xbox 360 Dashboard will be rolling out on November 19.

It will be available in 26 countries and localized in 19 languages. As you can see from the screenshot above (and more in this Joystiq gallery), not only are we getting a completely different user interface, but the experience will change too as this new version focuses strongly on bringing you and your friends closer to the Xbox by introducing avatars and allowing more interaction among friends.

Come back in one month and 10 days (or subscribe) to find out what I think of the new Dashboard.

Starting with the 2010 Focus Coupés, Ford will be providing its new MyKey technology as a standard feature. Later it will also be added to other models as a standard, too.

MyKeys will allow car owners to automatically limit radio volume and top speed as well as to configure speed and safety-belt alerts—surprisingly, it is especially targeted to parents with new teenage drivers. Limits and alerts should make driving safer, lower insurance fees and gas expenses, while still allowing new drivers to practice, which is also extremely important to develop the right reflexes.

It wasn’t clear from what I read though, just how modular the system is, e.g. can one key be associated to a profile that only has alarms and no limits?

I just hope that this extremely useful technology can be adopted by other manufacturers, since it’s simply based on coded keys that are widely used. In other words, I hope that some stupid patent (or worse, some greedy patent owner) doesn’t prevent other implementations of this technology to prosper.

More details on Ford’s press release.

I don’t have anything against Apple or Macs, but still I’m more of a PC person. The main reason is that I find that, for the same price, I can find equivalent (and “open”) hardware from PC manufacturers.

What I do love about Apple is that, since they fully control hardware and, to a large extent, software (when will the EU impose a N version of Mac OS, like it does for Windows?) they can do great things on the user experience side.

Speaking of cool things on the user experience side, according to this list of features, the new MacBook Pros will have a multi-touch trackpad, just like the MacBook Air and similar to the iPhone and the iPod Touch. Isn’t that great? I’m more and more tempted to get one of these in the short term, I can’t afford it just yet though ;)