NEC’s VUKUNET Started As ZUKUNET

October 28, 2013 by Dave Haynes

Funny little tidbit from Pierre Richer’s 25 minute riff at the tail end of the DailyDOOH Investor Conference last week in New York.

The head of NEC Display said when he and his team were pulling together the plans for digital signage ad-serving platform, they wanted a short, intriguing and cool brand name, a la Yahoo and Google and so on.

The agency came up with ZUKUNET – the idea behind it being that Zuku in Japanese was screens, and Net worked for network. ScreenNetwork. Bingo!

So a happy Richer shopped the idea with his Japanese bosses, explaining the Zuku bit was Japanese for screens.

No it’s not, said his Japanese colleagues.

Which is how they got to VUKUNET.