Sounds kinda familiar. Our sites include TechCrunch, CrunchGear, CrunchBase, MobileCrunch, etc.

A big deal? Not really. We’ve dealt with people using “Crunch” in their names before – sites like ArabCrunch, a blog about startups in the middle east that everything thinks we own. Usually we just dismiss these people as jerks who want to leverage off our brand because it’s not crowd pleasing to exercise intellectual property rights. AOL legal may or may not have a different position on it.

My guess is that the company named themselves this because they knew we’d write a post saying how lame it is, and any press is good press. But these are serious people. Not only are Accel and First Round legitimate, top tier firms, but founder Sean Black is a former founder and exec at Trulia.

By phone today Black says he reached out to our CEO months ago by email to discuss their name, but we never responded. No surprise there, email doesn’t really have much of a chance of getting read by us most of the time. But the fact that they knew it was an issue, one important enough to discuss with us, makes me wonder why they didn’t email once again, or pick up a phone.

Black also said he didn’t think it was going to be that big of a deal, mentioning Captain Crunch cereal. And that the “crunch” part of the name helped with the idea that they’re helping out sales people.

Why not just pick another name to launch your brand, though? I think something like sales…um….force would be perfect. Yes, Salesforce. Now there’s a name that sounds like it could be a winner with salespeople. They should have gone with that one, I think.

3…2…1…aaaand here come the haters in the comments.

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Authors: Michael Arrington

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