[Mac-telephony-list] About Afelio

[Benjamin Kowarsch via List]

As you may have noticed on the Sunrise website, the Mac PBX  
distribution will be relaunched under the name Afelio.

Afelio is the Spanish (and Portuguese) translation of the greek word  
Aphelion, an astronomy term meaning the most distant point from the  
sun of a heavenly body in orbit around the sun. This matches the  
theme of our company name and it was chosen when the poll we held in  
December did not produce a winner.

The poll was designed to measure both approval and disapproval  
because we did not want to select a name which had a very strong  
disapproval rate even if it came out on top. For this reason, votes  
were weighted to produce a composite approval-disapproval index: 1st  
choice scored 3 points, 2nd choice 2 points, 3rd choice 1 point and  
no-mentioning scored -1 (minus one) point, which produced the  
following percentage adjusted indices:

Name		Index
----------		----------
Eloquencia	18.6
Azzurro		27.1
TalkBridge	27.1
Synfony		27.2

Surprisingly, no matter how we changed the weighting, this pattern  
would not change in any significant way. We eventually concluded that  
none of the candidates were strong enough to be winners. This was a  
difficult decision because we had worked hard on this shortlist and  
it was difficult to let go of it.

Before we had produced this shortlist, one of the suggestions was to  
look for names related to astronomy so as to match the Sunrise theme.  
Aphelion had come up in the process and we actually liked it a lot.  
Unfortunately, it was oversubscribed and difficult to spell. When all  
the astronomy related terms coming out of the brainstorming also  
turned out to be heavily in use, we dropped the theme altogether.

After we decided to abandon the shortlist for lack of a clear result,  
I looked at the word Aphelion again. Translating it into Spanish  
turned up "Afelio" which looked like a winner. We used a market  
research firm to check approval rating which was above average. All  
that remains to do now is finish the migration - stay tuned.

rgds
benjk