By Steve Alten
Early in 2007, a group of Lightfleet marketing people were discussing the imminent public launch of Lightfleet’s simultaneous, all-to-all, continuous, broadcast optical interconnect invention. Several of us who can’t solve 2nd order differential equations in our heads anymore, couldn’t help but comment that simultaneous, all-to-all, continuous, broadcast optical interconnect didn’t exactly roll off the tongue. Even the most dedicated evangelist would soon start taking liberties and shorten it ad-hoc. We needed a cool name to call our technology.
A thousand words aren’t always better than a picture
We quickly filled up a whiteboard with catchy sounding names that inferred our use of light to communicate. We loved the names we came up with and even thought about changing our company name to some of the better ones. Unfortunately, our next step was to bring in a laptop and search for prior use of our list of great names. Who would’ve guessed that all the cool light based names were already in use?
Brainstorming sessions aren’t supposed to be pretty
I blame the Egyptians and the rise of the sun god Ra five millennia ago for the first documented mass popularity of light and light-based names. Egyptian Pharaohs were considered Ra’s manifestation on earth during his 1500+ year popularity and the obsession of light-based names certainly took hold in the public conscious. However, there seems to be little basis for the speculation propagated in the 1994 movie Stargate and subsequent TV series that Ra was a cruel alien focused on Universal domination and any negative connotations with light-based names as a result is unwarranted.
MacGyver gets my vote as the best Col. Jack O’Neill because he played the part for ten years!
Building upon the Egyptian success, the Greeks one-upped them with their Titan Helios flying his flaming chariot daily across the sky and also had Apollo as their Sun god (BTW, Titan, Helios, Apollo, and the Sun names are all now trademarks of their respective companies). Paganism fell out of favor during the Christian era when Constantius II initiated a harsh campaign against Polytheism. I think sun worship went into hiding until possibly the era of the Bikini started in the mid 1940s. But I digress…
With all the obvious light-based names taken, we combed through the biggest online dictionary we could lay our WiFi-enabled hands on and ran across an old English word “coruscate” which was a verb that meant to emit vivid flashes of light, sparkle, scintillate, or gleam. We have a potential winner!
Coruscate felt like the perfect sparkly word
Fearing an international non-starter like the Chevrolet Nova urban legend, we checked for variants of coruscate in foreign language dictionaries. We quickly ran across the Spanish word “coro“, which meant choir or chorus. The poetic merging of “coruscate” and “coro“ resulted in a choir of light, which is just what we felt our simultaneous, all-to-all, continuous, broadcast optical interconnect was. We decided the Spanish word had a higher likelihood of being spelled correctly and the prefix “coro” was picked for Lightfleet’s new family of names. Corowave technology was chosen as our first technology name as it reinforces the “wave” partial duality of light.
The Lightfleet “choir of light” circa summer of 2007
The reaction to the public unveiling of Corowave technology vastly exceeded our expectations and the Lightfleet story was picked up by the Wall Street Journal, Gartner Group, Illuminata, Ideas International, and about 80 more domestic and international mentions. Every analyst we met on the Corowave technology press tour told us “you don’t know what you have!” We’d like to think we know what we have, but we would love to have underestimated the impact on the world Corowave technology will have.
A small sample of the publishers that wrote about Corowave technology
Light is really, really fast and travels 186,282.397 miles per second (in a vacuum). This is about 670,000 MPH faster than the fastest car I’ve owned. Data modulated through the empty space at the speed of light is certainly more useful than a light speed capable car as I won’t have my license taken away for breaking archaic speed laws in a data center. I hope our cool name of Corowave technology can keep up with this amazing technology.