When I first entered the web space with an email and my first website, I took upon the recognition as “Naavi”. My first book in 1998 was authored under the name Naavi. (Cyber Laws for Every Netizen in India). My first website was naavi.com (Which is now used by an Australian Company). The website naavi.org fortunately continues with me. The first email naavi@vsnl.com became unusable since VSNL sold itself to Tatas and they discontinued the email service.
At this time, I had anticipated issues in the domain space arising out of similar looking domain names and had introduced a service called “Lookalikes.in” which was a voluntary disclosure for one website owner to declare that the domain name is not related to another domain name which may look similar.
When I adopted the name Naavi, the name “Navi” was considered and left out since it was a registered trademark of Nokia in Japan and also in India reminded people of Navi Mumbai.
Naavi on the other hand was a direct english translation of my initials in Kannada and I had genuine trademark rights. (My Name is Vijayashankar Nagaraja Rao, where Na in Nagaraja is spoken as Naa).
When the film Avatar was released, Google started behaving erratically recognizing NaVi as equivalent to Naavi and the google search for Naavi was directed to Navi, since the movie used the term Navi to describe a clan.
After a while Avatar went to the background as the interest in searches on Avatar the movie receded.
Recently however, Mr Sachin Bansal, the former Flipkart entrepreneur is creating problems for me since he has started his new ventures under the name “NaVi”. This business is in the field of Finance and Loans which also happens to be my career in the past where I worked with Indian Overseas Bank and Nagarjuna group. I was a consultant in the financial sector and done extensive work with NBFCs in Chennai.
As a result when people look at Navi loans or Navi Mutual funds, there is a natural confusion as to whether these businesses are associated with my activities.
When the Naavi.com was acquired by a cyber squatter, I thought the name Naavi could not be that important and ignored the loss. When it was acquired by an Australian Company which was into training, after some initial correspondence the conflict was ignored.
Unfortunately Mr Sachin Bansal’s venture is in India and is related to Finance and I have been receiving some calls to enquire if these companies belong to me. There are spam complaints also against the Navi companies which may get confused with me.
While I can consider placing a disclaimer under Lookalikes.com to declare that naavi.org is not related to Navi group of Sachin Bansal, it is sad to know that Google does not distinguish between Naavi and Navi and search for Naavi gets diverted to Navi.
Google should be ashamed of its algorithm that blindly considers Naavi and Navi same terms and needs to be retrained.
I also request that the Navi group of Companies provide a disclaimer that it is not related to Naavi.
I am not sure how Navi group will deal with their trademark infringement with Nokia but the confusing similarity with Naavi needs to be amicably settled.
I am taking the proactive step since Navi.com is already in the list of “Confusingly similar websites” listed in the Lookalikes disclaimer which is available under the link About-Legal.
I wish that Sachin Bansal group also displays a disclaimer that Navi websites and activities are not related to Naavi.
Naavi
