It’s Turkey Time!

TURKEY! TURKEY! (Owner: TURKEY TURKEY TURKEY, INC.)

Jennie-O

Jordan Cold Turkey

Hansel & Gretel: The Orange Turkey

Stuff'n Turkey

Haribo: not just gummibears

Haribo licorice(?) mascot in cowboy hat and boots

HARIBO GOLD-BÄREN

HARIBO MACHT KINDER FROH

Haribo Whirls

Haribo LICORICE-Cigarettes

HARIBO NASCHKÜSSE

HARIBO: IN ALLER WELT - IN ALLER MUND (IN ALL THE WORLD - IN EVERY MOUTH)

HARIBO KATINKAS

HARIBO Spaghetti (Erdbeer/Strawberry)

Atomic Brand Names

Radium Butter

Radium Starch

Radium Matches

Radium Export Cigars

Nutex Radium Condoms

Atomic Brand Names at the Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) Health Physics Historical Instrumentation Museum Collection (via How To Be a Retronaut).

Going Bananas

All this beautiful summer weather has us

and it got us so excited that we are going to bring a whole slew of banana trademarks and random banana factoids.

Big Bananas!

Fun Fact: Banana consumption rises in the Muslim World during Ramadan. This fact excites tasty banana vendors everywhere.

Surfin’ Bananas

Cool Bananas

Cracked on Cocaine from the 1980′s BananasBanana Pillows!

Tripping out on Acid like its 1973 Bananas

 Frogs with Bananas

Gorillas Feeling Up Bananas

 Driving Bananas

King Bananas

Organic Bananas

Banana Condoms

Dancing Bananas

Weirdly Penis Shaped Bananas

Southern Miss vs. Iowa

After losing the 520 Eagle here in Seattle, I did not think I could bear to lose another eagle in such close proximity but it looks I am set to do just that.

When Southern Miss set out to re-image themselves, they could have guessed that it would erupt into the conflagration that it has become. In 2003, they chose a brand new mascot and logo for their school: Then, they proceeded to plaster it everywhere around campus including the middle of the football field and even on the pants of all their football players. However, they have been struck a massive blow just today by Trademark Trial and Appeal Board when it ruled against them saying that “the overall similarity in appearance of the marks on the goods, particularly in light of the use of identical color schemes, creates virtually identical commercial impressions.” They additionally shot down Southern Miss’s argument that the use of birds of prey mascot is common but this argument was shot down as well with the Justice Bucher saying:

When making a visual comparison between Iowa’s Hawkeyes marks and each of these designs, we find that none of these Division I third-party marks remotely resembles Iowa’s Hawkeyes designs. Certainly, none is as similar to Iowa’s marks as is (USM’s) mark. Moreover, whether some of these third-party marks (e.g., those having commercial impressions quite distinct from the marks of Iowa and USM) are similar to each other is not relevant to our analysis, and has no bearing on the question of whether the marks in this case are likely to cause confusion.

For comparison, here is the University of Iowa‘s logo: This continues a long history of epic levels of trademarking by the University of Iowa. Fun Fact: The University of Iowa is considered a Public Ivy school. This long history even contains adventures to foreign lands with the college having a registered trademark in Germany. They have also trademarked this logo for woman’s sporting events that incorporates Roman symbol for women which I think is rather clever.

And I like this one, it exudes dignity, distinction, and being founded in 1847.

Southern Miss on the other has a relatively paltry repertoire. My solution is that we should put their mascots in a ring and let them fight it out:

      vs.   

I think Southern Miss would win. Their mascot looks a bit like the Hulk with feathers.

A Salute to News Corp

With all the current huzzaballoo about News Corp in the news, I figured it was time to take into the trademark archives to see what we could dig up on News Corp, or News International as they are more properly known. News Corp has/had some pretty shady trademarks including for a mortgaging business. They also have a healthy obsession with the letters E and its future role as overlord of the global financial markets with trademarks like:

• EPartners
• E*Partners (what the difference between this I do not know but they are both trademarked)
• EVentures
• ELoanInc
• EFinance
• Ecubator
• EFinance
  

These are all part of Rupert Murdoch’s money laundering empire clearly .

Weekend Camping

Friday always makes me think of camping. Of spending a wonderful weekend out in the crisp outdoors in some beautiful location. Out here in Seattle, it is a huge pass time and there are tons of places to go within two hours drive. All this camping is driving by two things: love for the outdoors and the gear that keeps those hikers going. I bring you the first of several homages to those wonderful outfitters.

I have had Coleman gear my entire life and its has served me really well with my tent serving me for the last 10+ years and still kicking. The Coleman Company was founded in 1900 in Kingfisher, Oklahoma but soon moved to Wichita, Kansas in 1902. According to the Kansas Secretary of State, they incorporated as COLEMAN LAMP & STOVE COMPANY on 1907/09/04 and has been producing camping gear ever since. Their most famous product is lanterns though. This is exemplified by the first trademark we have on record for them:

The setting sun is a metaphor for the brightness of Coleman lanterns and how it helps you when the sun goes away

It’s a beautiful simple logo with motifs that continue throughout the rest of trademarks to the present day. These include the simple, sans-serif font, the horizontal printing of the name of the company that dominates the trademark, the underlining of this text, and prominent featuring of a light source. In later logos, this is usually a lantern.

Here’s the oldest trademark that is still active and they are still keeping updated. It’s a little simpler and it’s missing that distinctive light source. However, it has all of the other distinctive features. This trademark is also the first issued under the current company name which is COLEMAN COMPANY, INC., THE whereas previous marks had been issued to COLEMAN LAMP AND STOVE COMPANY

Oldest still active Coleman trademark

This trend continues through this trademark from 1991:

And evolves a little further into this:

One of their most unique products is a type of boat called scanoe which is a mix of skiff and canoe that they only make. But their trademark adorn all sorts of other interesting products:

• Air conditioning apparatus, including central air conditioning units for home use, air conditioning equipment for use with recreational and other vehicles; cooling install
• Backpack frames, backpack sacks, backpack day packs, and camping trailers
• Cooler chests and insulated jugs
• Heizungs- und Kühlgeräte, Isolierflaschen
• Oil warm air furnaces, oil space heaters, gasoline lamps and lanterns, gasoline camp stoves, trailer cooking stoves and heaters
• Sleeping bags and tents
• Soap and wax for pressure washers motor-powered high pressure water sprayers
• Spas in the nature of heated pools
• Water skis

• Animal fattening preparations; animal foodstuffs; animal forage (lime for -); salt licks for cattle by David Alan Coleman

• Analytical measuring instruments-namely, spectrophotometers, flame photometers, electric colorimeters, photo-nephelometers, nepho-colorimeters photo fluorometers, ph electrometers, autotrators, together with associated parts and accessories by Coleman Instruments Corporation

• Building & railway construction/repairs/maintenance by Kerri-Anne Coleman

The above for railway maintenance is currently one of my favorite of all time in terms of its aesthetic qualities and simplicity. Also, we can be certain from this series that Coleman is an extremely common name in Australia. I just want to leave you with this bizarre trademark I found that I am not quite sure what to think about. It was registered in Austria.

Kick! Blast! Surge! Fuse!

Leatherman has some pretty action-packed trademarks. They reminded me of all those classic Batman episodes with onomatopoeia when guys got hit.

Hacker-Pschorr Bräu beer labels

Schloßbräu München

St. Hubertus Bier

Animator

Pschorr

And no, Löbrau is not a Hacker-Pschorr beer.

ElasticSearch Invades Trade.mar.cx

Here at Trade.mar.cx, we have exciting news! We have been working behind the scenes
to upgrade our site to give some greatly enhanced capabilities and give you ever
better abilities to search within our annals and find trademarks.

Our major upgrade is largely centered around a change in the software that we are
using on our backend to store the content. We have begun using ElasticSearch.
What is that you say? “It is an Open Source (Apache 2), Distributed, RESTful,
Search Engine built on top of Lucene.” Now that is a lot of information so I’ll
go through it bit by bit and go into what that means for us and you, our users.

Open Source

We at Trade.mar.cx loves open source and so we are really excited that we could
switch to a more powerful backend that was also open source. This continues our
policy here at Trade.mar.cx of only using open source technologies. We use:

1. Apache (Web Server)
2. ElasticSearch (Search Engine Framework)
3. Java (Programming Language)
4. Lucene (Document Search Framework)
5. MySQL (Database Server)
6. Nginx (Web Server)
7. Ruby (Programming Language)
8. Tire (Ruby Library for Interacting With ElasticSearch)
9. Sinatra (Web Site/Service Microframework)

This means that we can develop quickly and cheaply and if we find a bug, we
can actually dive in and fix it for the most part.

Distributed

We love that we are moving a more distributed backend for our data. This
software choice means that we will be able to scale almost infinitely with
very little trouble. This means that we can make your experience faster and
better. In addition, this allows us to bring more content more quickly as well.
We are leveraging this distributed nature by running a very powerful local indexing
box here at Trade.mar.cx headquarters and then the results generated locally are
synced up to the servers that we have sitting on the network. This allows us to
give you a very powerful experience while spending less money for servers.

RESTful

This means that it offers a very consistent and easy to understand interface
for making queries. This simplifies our work and makes it easy for us to build
complex, amazing, or just drop dead simple queries easily and quickly. This service
accepts and returns JSON, a very efficient data transmission format as well a format
that code in your web browser can easily use to make your experience ever better.

Lucene

We are exciting for working with Lucene for a lot of reasons most of them are summed
up by this blurb from Wikipedia:

“Apache Lucene is a free/open source information retrieval software library, originally created in Java by Doug Cutting. It is supported by the Apache Software Foundation and is released under the Apache Software License. While suitable for any application which requires full text indexing and searching capability, Lucene has been widely recognized [1][2] for its utility in the implementation of Internet search engines and local, single-site searching. At the core of Lucene’s logical architecture is the idea of a document containing fields of text. This flexibility allows Lucene’s API to be independent of the file format. Text from PDFs, HTML, Microsoft Word, and OpenDocument documents, as well as many others, can all be indexed as long as their textual information can be extracted.” (Wikipedia : Lucene)

Interestingly, the only trademark we have for Lucene is from a company in Korean named LG Chemical, LTD. They are actually the largest Korean chemical company and are the ones responsible for designing and manufacturing the lithium ion batteries for the new Chevrolet Volt.

Why We’re Excited

We are really excited about the things that this transition allows us to do. We have started by
revamping our search, autocomplete bar, and related trademarks facets. These are now 100% backed
by ElasticSearch and are producing tons better results for you. We were using MySQL full text search
before . Check it out:

On top of what we have already done, we intend to leverage this new infrastructure to launch new
things. Hope to come include:

1. Advanced Search
2. Search Between Dates
3. Wikipedia Search
4. Online Man Pages with Search

We’ll Keep You Posted,
Andrew Gall