Slide presentation: What’s in a name?
As we’ve begun introducing Glisser to customers and investors, a fair few of them have asked where the name comes from.
When I worked for Octopus Investments I used to get asked the same thing all the time – I think people want to understand how and why you come up with something that is critical in defining your company and its brand. It’s an important (but often emotionally-driven) decision.
We chose it after about six months of dropping alternative options into our prototype app during the build. ‘SPA’, standing for ‘Social Presentation App’, was original codename for the project. Then we toyed with ‘Super-Powers’, with various spellings we might be able to get the dot-com for (including the awful ‘SupaPowaz’), which evolved into ‘Power Slides’. This felt too generic, so morphed into ‘Powrr.It’, but although we bought the domain name, we soon went off something that was too contrived and not necessarily easy to say.
Most of the ideas so far had revolved around ‘Power’ – a reference to PowerPoint as well the enhancement of the capabilities of a regular presentation. Yet it was ‘slides’ that ultimately led to the name we went with, when I decided to Google the French Verb for ‘to slide’. ‘Glisser’. Awesome, I thought; a beautiful sounding word (both in French and a literal English pronunciation) that was also short and memorable. Further checks indicated we could use this safely and the glisser.com domain was within our start-up budget, and so Glisser was born.
Since then, I’ve found more and more connections with what are doing. ‘Glisser-déposer’ is the French for ‘drag and drop’ – the method by which you add social slides to a presentation in the app.
Plus, it’s already enabled us to extend the brand to the community of customers we’re building – the pun-tastic ‘Glisserati’.
Sorry about that one – at least we dropped ‘SupaPowaz’ before it saw the light of day…
