Posts Tagged ‘telemetry’

There are many pitfalls with naming products. There are wonderful stories about how car names, for instance, when translated into indigenous languages can suddenly have a totally difference meaning.

There’s a great website looking at cultural differences, internationalisation, translation and software engineering that has a great page on Marketing Translation Mistakes. Some are just a bit too rude to publish on here, but just click on the link and have a good laugh. It’s not due to a lack of imagination that we refer to our products by initials and numbers!

But it’s not really translations I want to talk about here, it is how some words become accepted as descriptors but others just don’t catch on or are used in a different context. I came across this recently when we launched our range of Shackle Load Cells. As well as the cabled models, 2 new wireless telemetry versions are also available. [Now, this isn’t the place to talk about how great they are – you can find that out by clicking on the link to LCM Systems’ Corporate website.].

Before launch I wrote the pages for the website, the downloadable data sheets and briefed our PR agency to write press releases and articles. All our promotional data talked about telemetry shackles. Now, they are telemetry load cells. Telemetry derives from the Greek, tele = remote and metron = measure and is now widely used throughout industry as a technique that enables remote measurement and reporting of a wide range of information. In the widest sense of the term, it includes data transferred over hard wired systems but is generally used to refer to wireless methodology using radio or infrared systems.

BUT, and it’s a big but (no sniggering at the back please), engineers using load cells tend to refer to this particular type of product as wireless. So, we have wireless shackle cells, wireless data acquisition (WDA), wireless networking etc., whereas a quick Google search for ‘telemetry’ brings up information about companies manufacturing and supplying modems and enabling transfer of information to remote locations.

So, in future it’s Wireless Shackle load cells.

So, what do you think? Am I right? Would you search Google for wireless or telemetry load cells?