Naavi was adopted by me as a name as an short version of my Kannada name Nagaraja Rao Vijayashankar.
The website naavi.com was launched on 14th December 1998 as a personal website and later converted into a Cyber Law website.
We can extract the first looks of the website from the Wayback machine where the earliest available page is 12th October 1999.
The first looks of the website look interesting though very archaic now.
When I launched my first book in 1999 “Cyber Laws for Every Netizen in India”, the name was published as the name of the author of the book.
While adopting naavi as my popular name, the word “Navi” was avoided because it phonetically could be spoken as in Navi Mumbai and also Navi was a registered trademark of Nokia and otherwise in Japan.
When the film “Avtar” was launched the first clash with phonetic “Naavi” was felt and a trademark application was formally launched.
However naavi.com was cyber squatted and later sold to a company in Australia. But Naavi.org which was hosted as a mirror site for Naavi.com remained in my custody and continued to host my content.
The Trademark registration in India for service marks were not available when the website naavi.com/naavi.org was launched and also the system of Trademark registration is steeped in inefficiency.
Now Sachin Bansal of the Flipkart fame has applied for trademark on Navi and the trademark office would perhaps grant it.
On the other hand I can record that for my trademark application of CEAC, the trade mark officer raised objections on CEAT and several other marks which had no relation to the trademark category. Similarly the trademark application of Cyber Law College was objected to and trade mark application of Naavi was not attended to for ages. With my experience I can state that the Trademark registration is only for those with deep pockets who can manage the corruption in the system and not for those who pursue it only as a legal right.
Anyway now it is interesting that Honda has launched a vehicle in the name “Navi” but phonetically the videos speak of “Naavi”.
Sensing this type of disputes, I had submitted a patent application and launched the service Verify4lookalikes.com which is now hosted under lookalikes.in. The services I envisaged here are now implemented by many others in the world and I could not take the patent application beyond getting the approval of the PCT.
It is too late now for getting disappointed about these failed encounters with Trademarks and Patents and sit back and enjoy that the name “Naavi” reverberates with the sound of the Honda motorcycle.
Naavi
You are going to quietly take it, right?