What’s in a company name?

In a global age where names like Google,  Altria, Yahoo! and Yelp are common place it would seem anything goes.

HooPmedia came to be in a circuitous series of events that mirror the growth of the Internet. Google didn’t exist in 1992 when I was building my first multimedia company, FreeWill Interactive. The notion of gathering information from whatever source you chose was a new concept. Information was no longer under the control of a few authorities. Now anyone could publish anything–for better or worse.

Finding a wave and surfing it to freedom is a distinctly Californian approach and caught on as a global trend. As the web globalized the web-surfing concept evolved into the InfoBahn (after the German AutoBahn which has no speed limit) and later when Al Gore commercialize the net, the Information Super Highway.

FreeWill Interactive embodied all these ideas however after enduring endless and exasperating questions about free will from a religious context I changed  the name to Radiant New Media in 1995. Projects included interactive presentations on CD-ROM and early web sites at a time when everything was changing very, very quickly. One of the first major clients was ICE Communications and the creation of BBN Planet prior to its sale to GTE and its further evolution into AT&T’s network, Verizon and beyond.

Marketing managers can now increase the scope of their firm’s marketing communications strategy by adding the Internet to its range of marketing communication channels. Five user patterns: exploratory surfing, window surfing, evolved surfing, bounded navigation and targeted navigation. Steve Muylle, Rudy Moenaert, Marc Despontin – 1999

The emerging WWW and the concepts of hypertext and surfing information were intoxicating. To my mind a simple thought could radiate outwards into the world and that was the essence of world wide web is. Radiant Ideas! Modern mandalas of rich media. Both of these company names to needed explaining rather than capturing the core ideas I thought were so obviously paraphrases of the web concept.

HooPmedia evolved in 1996 and has endured even though I get a lot of requests for basketball statistics. HooPmedia is a personal concept that embodies two of my core technical tools, Hypertext and Object Oriented Programming which I combine with creatively superlative media. I grew up in the Canadian north-west with several generations of family involvement with Canada’s indigenous peoples. As I child I’d seen many hoop dances performed with their powerful drumming and singing. I loved the symbols and stories filled with thundering sounds and swirling circles.  HooPmedia embodies these passions and symbolic stories in an Internet media development scope.

In Feburary 1997, a HooPmedia project, TeamBoard.com was launched. As that company’s first foray on to the web, it was an exciting project and a great technology product-an interactive whiteboard. I was invited to join TeamBoard’s parent company Egan Visual to build their initial website Egan.com as well. I produced hundreds of B2B marketing projects and continued to grow the digital technologies for those two companies until the founder suddenly passed away. It was time for me to discover the next big thing.

This new HooPmedia website shares my experiences exploring the power of ideas and the problems of communicating them effectively to an audience. Onwards!