And perhaps more to the point, why should I care what Motorola is doing?
Well, you may not hear his name bounced around on TechCrunch or Digg, but you might recognise some of the sites he’s behind. SlashPhone and SlashGear are maybe the best known, but he’s also responsible for Unbox.IT, MYiPhone and a host of other, topic-specific news sites.
There’s no big budget behind any of it, just a whole load of enthusiastic writers. In fact, that’s where I came in - Vincent has a habit of offering new bloggers a chance, and all of a sudden my words were getting quite a few more readers than the just-about-double-figures I’d managed before.
If there’s one thing I’d say about him, it’s that he’s got his finger on the trends. Registering motorazr.com is a good example of that; who, outside of Motorola, would’ve known the numerous handsets that the original RAZR would spawn? Maybe that’s even the cause of the current troubles: Motorola itself didn’t recognise what Vincent did, that people will flock to something iconic and buy into the whole ethos of it. And now they’re trying to gather up all the pieces, not by courting the bloggers and the consumers, but by throwing their weight around with bully tactics.
It’s not all bad news, however; at the same time that Vincent was getting the corporate equivalent of a shakedown from Motorola he was also getting interviewed by the Wall Street Journal (link to the WSJ video) for their article on the current unboxing phenomenon. And so if Motorola’s lawyers (and you can bet there’s a whole great phalanx of them) do end up blurring trademark law and manage to hijack motorazr.com, you can bet your last dollar, pound or yen that he’ll be back with something else, something new. I’m hoping I get to come along for the ride. Chris Davies - Executive Editor of SlashGear.com.
