Gadgetopia

CEOs shudder at thought of BlackBerry shutdown: A article about how many in the business world are terrified at the thought of having their Blackberries shut off.

“It’s just nuts. The idea that someone is just going to switch it off in three or four weeks, even if it’s only in the United States, is crazy,” Peter Levene, chairman of the Lloyd’s of London insurance market, told Reuters.

“Everybody has adapted their working habits to it. If you close it off at a stroke the damage could be colossal.”

I got to wondering, all of the sudden, where they came up with the name “BlackBerry.” Sure enough, Wikipedia has the answer:

“Whimsical as it may seem, RIM settled on it only after weeks of work by Lexicon Branding Inc., the Sausalito, California-based firm that named Intel Corp.’s Pentium microprocessor and Apple’s PowerBook. One of the naming experts at Lexicon thought the miniature buttons on RIM’s product looked like the tiny seeds in a strawberry, Lexicon founder David Placek says. A linguist at the firm thought straw was too slow sounding. Someone else suggested blackberry. RIM went for it.” From a Bloomberg article by Anthony Effinger.