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The naming business chugs right along with 3:
A new company name for Hutchison 3G.

LONDON, May 6, 2002. Former Wolff Olins (the agency that named Monday) brand genius Doug Hamilton, who had a hand in naming the British telecomm company Orange and the cut-price airline Go, has just renamed mobile multimedia company Hutchison 3G. The new name? Simply the numeral 3.

This is a bold move, enlisting a solitary digit as the company name, which will be pronounced differently in the different languages of countries it will serve. While Seven beat it to a mobile communications number name by over a year, 3 will be the first that is expressed as just a numeral, signifying its position as the only wireless phone service to be pure 3G, or Third Generation, meaning much faster data transfer rates. But just barely, as BT Cellnet recently renamed itself mmO2, and its mobile services O2, after splitting from BT. And like Seven, 3 will be spelled out in web addresses, clouding its numeric purity somewhat.

What effect a future 4G mobile spec will have on this new company can only be guessed at, but it should always be a concern when naming is based on a current but likely to be updated technology standard. Think MP3.com after audio advances to Mpeg4 compression.

For more background on the current competition for meaningful, distinctive telecomm names, read this excellent article about the genesis of the brand Orange: Paint the Town Orange - How Canadian New Age magnate Hans Snook turned a colour into Europe's hippest wireless empire, by Eric Reguly, in the June 2001 Issue of R.O.B. (Report On Business) magazine.