A fascinating lesson in social media: an ill-thought out start-up that also failed to check whether its chosen name was trademarked.
Peeple is an app for reviewing people rather than businesses - something many people saw as an open hunt for cyber bullying. It's quickly earned the hashtag #creeple. As Garth Penglase points out, it's also infringing on, and bringing negative publicity to, an unrelated start up with the same name.
A mess all around then....
Unfortunately for them, the truth about "once it's on the Internet it's out there forever" is now going to haunt them for a long time. And I feel confident that henceforth this will be the prime example used in many educational institutions as a warning about this, and also as a cautionary tale against running with poorly thought out startup ideas. Ones that end up spawning a #Creeple tag on Twitter. But there has been an innocent bystander and real loser in this debacle, and that is the focus of this article. It would seem that one of the first mistakes that Peep made was omitting to do a trademark search, instead moving ahead with the chosen name before properly checking whether it would infringe on an existing trademark or clash with existing companies.
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