Aladdin Systems is now Allume Systems

[Doctor Q]

Aladdin Systems, maker of StuffIt , one of the most-used Mac applications ever, changed its name to Allume Systems last month.

The long-standing www.aladdinsys.com web site is now redirected to www.allume.com. They still have the magic lamp logo and refer to themselves on the web and in e-mail as "Allume Systems (formerly Aladdin Systems)".

They changed in order to settle legal disagreements with Aladdin Knowledge Systems (www.ealaddin.com (http://www.ealaddin.com/) or www.aladdin.de ( http://www.aladdin.de/)), maker of dongles and other security products. I happen to use products of both companies, and I sometimes went to one web site when I meant the other. There was probably longstanding confusion between the companies (and maybe also with Aladdin Enterprises (www.aladdin.com/index2.html (http://www.aladdin.com/index2.html)), the original maker of Ghostscript).

Aladdin Systems must have had little choice but to make this change, because they are sacrificing a huge amount of name recognition.

I wonder why they picked "Allume" as their new name. And why not call themselves StuffIt after their most famous product, since they already have www.stuffit.com (http://www.stuffit.com/)?

[5300cs]

Ahh, I don't know if 'StuffIt' would be such a good company name. Though come to think of it, 'Allume' isn't much better :rolleyes:

[narco]

Good. Aladdin reminds me of all the early Mac OS's like 8.5 and 9 for some reason. They definitely needed an update.

.narco

[haiggy]

It has been like this for a very long time now.

[iMeowbot]

I wonder why they picked "Allume" as their new name.
A few years ago, a US law went though that makes it easier to sue for trademark dilution (which is when a "famous" trademark holder feels that its image is threatened by another product or business using the same name, even if there is no product overlap). "Stuffit" and close variations are in use out there for other things, so the name isn't as string as it might be.

Made-up words like Allume are easier to protect exactly because they're made up; it pretty much eliminates the "common words" defense and it's a lot less likely that someone else will have invented the same word.

The other part of the story is that Aladdin were initially fighting to keep the name, but after they were bought by IMSI, the new parent company didn't want the legal expenses.

[Doctor Q]

Allume has been acquired by Smith Micro Software.

Press release (http://www.smithmicro.com/default.tpl?group=news_full&id1=273&id2=13):Smith Micro Software Inc., a developer and marketer of a wide range of software and services for the wireless market, today announced it has acquired Allume Systems, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of International Microcomputer Software Inc.

Allume is a leading provider of compression software solutions that enable state of the art compression, security and archiving of data including JPEG, MPEG and MP3 platforms. The Company's pioneering product suite known as StuffIt® has been a de facto industry standard since 1986.I suppose the Aladdin software -- StuffIt, Internet Cleanup, Spring Cleaning, etc. -- will stay the same, but with yet another new owner.

[Doctor Q]

More about it here (http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/07/05/smithmicro/index.php?lsrc=mcrss).

Smith Micro makes FAXstf X (fax software) and QuickLink Mobile (wireless connectivity software) and was interested in Allume because of their newly developed compression software.Allume recently announced the development of a JPEG compression technique that yields a 30 percent reduction in the size of images without any penalty on image quality, and the company expects to be able to apply a similar technique to MPEG video and MP3 audio files.

[emw]

Sounds like an interesting compression technology. I ordered the white paper so I'll post if there's anything interesting. At first, I thought it was a "new and improved" JPEG, but it's just a way of compressing the JPEG images into a .sit file. Still interesting, but not quite as much so.

[Doctor Q]

The bulk e-mail they sent today about the latest version of Internet Cleanup is signedJonathan Kahn
President
Allume Systemswith no mention of the new owner. Perhaps Jonathan Kahn simply hasn't read his newspaper yet today.