Oh no! If the start-up world wasn't difficult enough already I recently ran into a an issue that might sink my little bootstrapped ship a little faster than anticipated. I can change my name and re-brand my business but after four months of preliminary marketing and research efforts I'm in 'that' place where I need to start promoting my businesses, follow up with my contacts and hopefully make a little money.<p>My scenario is a little unique in that I developed my start-up ( I couldn't find anything else in the market I liked )to help me launch a few other business ideas with more traditional businesses models. I did not Trademark my start-up name but I have been live for about 4 months and have made contact with over 800 interested artists/businesses ( I used Sonicbids.com to run a promotion to attract artists and musicians). I feel my intent to use this name has been shown. I have also developed a mobile app that plays off and works to compliment the start up name which reinforces the idea that re-branding is possible but not ideal.<p>I threw out a question to the team at Sprouter and this was their response.<p>"The good news is that just by making use of a brand name, you require certain trademark rights in it. Therefore, if you have made any public use of this name prior to Google making its announcement, you might possibly have certain common law trademark rights in it. However, if this is something that has merely been in development and you have made no public use of it, or even if you have made only limited public use of it, you will have some difficulty in asserting your rights against Google. Your best course of action at this point is to retain a lawyer who can review the specifics of your case and consider whether or not contacting Google at this stage is a good option available to you in order to reach some sort of co-existence agreement."<p>I question the idea of 'limited public use', in that I developed the platform to help me launch and market my businesses with the thought that any additional users of my platform would be a bonus as I don't need millions of users to make my model profitable.<p>Google is using the name for their Google TV 2.0 platform for Android and their first press release showed up around June 22, 2011. I'm using the name as a social network with a mobile app and have been live since mid March of this year, and although I have gained very little traction, the idea is I can prove the viability of my platform by using it to market my other business ideas (clothing, music and blog/app). Once that happens I will market my platform more aggressively to outside users with proven vs speculative results.<p>fishtank(google) vs. http://fishtaank.com (dave)<p>Any thoughts? Feedback?<p>"From the mountains, through the hillside the crazy river water flows. It takes my to my pot of gold buried underneath a little stone. I'll find a horse and ride away and take out across the open plains. I'll turn into the wind and go to find out what my story knows."
Regardless of the answer, do you really want to go up against Google's legal team?<p>Your post makes it sound like you don't have money to throw around on lawyers, but even if you did, I would question the wisdom in that. As a bootstrapper, you need to choose your battles.<p>If it were me, I would re-brand just to avoid the hassle of going against a big company with an army of lawyers.
You don't have a legal question, you have a marketing question. The answer is to change your name if you think Google's use of it might overshadow yours or confuse your users/prospective users.
Consult a lawyer. That's really the only advice that anyone can give at this point, other than that you should do your best to avoid getting into a lawsuit with Google.