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"What do you do when you want to build up buzz for your startup without revealing an iota of what its purpose is? Name it after one of the most divisive memes on the Internet, of course: Hipster.\nSo what is Hipster? We don't know. The service is currently in stealth mode, the only info available being a \"Coming Soon\" page featuring a picture of your city and a call to sign up for more information. One is also asked to refer the service to three friends in order to gain swifter access.\nAccording to founder Doug Ludlow (who we wrote about four years ago for creating GroupMe predecessor Zemble), Hipster had been in a small closed alpha in Boulder, Colorado up until yesterday. (If you do a bit of digging on Hacker News you'll see folks commenting on the alpha, which they liken to \"Quora meets Foursquare\" \u2014 so there you go.)\nLudlow wouldn't tell us any more about the startup yet \u2014 he has applied to Jason Calacanis's Launch Conference, and can't say anything until he knows whether he's made the cut. However, he has agreed to fill us in when he can, so stay tuned.\n\n\n\n\nPutting functionality aside for a moment, let's focus on the name, which came to my attention after TechCrunch discoursed on the matter the other day.\n\"Hipster\" is an extremely controversial term in some respects (believe me, I'm supposed to be an expert on it, apparently) \u2014 as Ludlow says, \"Some people hate the name, some people laugh when they hear it\" \u2014 but it is also representative of a rather popular Internet meme. Remember, we named \"Hipsters\" one of our favorite memes of 2010. And memes \u2014 of late \u2014 have spelled money for many companies.\nIn recent months, we've seen several companies hitching their wagons to the meme/viral culture train \u2014 the Travelocity Gnome appeared on Chatroulette,  as did that Last Exorcism chick, the Double Rainbow Guy shilled for Microsoft, and, most recently, golden-voiced homeless man Ted Williams was in a commercial for Kraft. \"Hipsters,\" for their part, have most notably shown up in a commercial for Honda.\nThe adoption of the term by companies makes sense; \"hipster,\" as a word, has had a steadily growing presence on the web in the past year or so \u2014 take a look at Google Trends \u2014 and we've seen a proliferation of humor blogs, videos and parody songs bubbling across the web in the past 12 months as a result (still, the term seems to be plateauing of late, so Ludlow might want to speed up his reveal). For SEO's sake alone, calling your service \"Hipster\" is a pretty shrewd move.\nCase in point, Ludlow says: \"[Signups have] been insane over the last 15 hours. We've had close to 3,700 signups now. At the rate we're going, we're going to hit 10,000 by the end of the day.\" \nWhile we can't attribute the growing interest in the startup to the name alone, it's safe to say it's providing a goodly amount of the attention \u2014 given that no one knows what the startup is.\nSo far, the divisive nature of the name seems to be doing well for Ludlow (aside from the few e-mails expressing broad disdain for hipster culture), but is the assignation of the term a wise choice in the long run when it comes to business? We asked a few experts for their input on this particular memefication:\nThe Naming Expert\nWhat's in a name? Well, when you're a business \u2014 everything. Yes, startups with admittedly silly names have more than succeeded (Twitter, anyone?), but naming your startup after a counterculture, or the meme that it has spawned, seems a little risky.\nTo see how \"Hipster\" rates when it comes to staying power, Mashable turned to Nina Beckhardt, president of The Naming Group (an agency whose employees have crafted names for Walmart, Target and Puma).\nAfter being presented with the little information we have and the name itself, she told us that Ludlow is really going to have to amp up the humor of the term if he wants to succeed, playing off of the tongue-in-cheek quality of the word. \n\"From what I can see in terms of their current pre-launch marketing tactics, this attention-grabbing, too cool for school (the categorical summation of most hipsters), just-you-wait-and-see type of witholding strategy, the name has real promise,\" Beckhardt says. \"That is a strategy that a hipster might choose.\" \nStill, in order for the business to succeed, it has to offer more than the temporal popularity of the word, Beckhardt says. \"The offering's equity must hold strong and grow no matter how the definition morphs or how centrally or peripherally it remains in our lexicon over time. Again, it's a bold move. The success of the name is ultimately dependent on execution and delivery of the offering.\"\nThe Marketing Expert\nAs we mentioned before, the application of a meme to a marketing campaign is nothing new. Still, we began to wonder how successful these campaigns really were. David Berkowitz, senior director of emerging media and innovation at 360i, tells us that it's a fine line when it comes to the marriage between marketing and memes.\n\"A lot of marketers can get publicity, but it\u2019s not always good publicity,\" he says. \"Then there\u2019s the trick of capitalizing on it. Do people remember that Microsoft did the Double Rainbow spot, and then do they know what product Microsoft was promoting? (Answer: Windows Live, which I had to Google \u2013- I didn\u2019t even Bing it.)\"\n\"For Hipster, I\u2019m especially curious if the site is ultimately hip, ironic, snarky, Brooklyn-esque, or in any way remotely related to its name,\" he adds. \"Hipster will probably do well attracting signups, based on the buzz I\u2019m seeing already. But without any context, who knows if any of these people signing up will actually care about the site once it launches.\"\nSo again, it all depends on how the product stacks up against the initial popularity of the meme.\nThe Hipster(?)\nSo how do the denizens of the counter culture feel about the whole thing? Will they embrace it in the same way many a hipster (and non-hipster) has embraced the similarly monikered Hipstamatic iPhone app? \nWell, it's not like I can go downstairs to my local coffee shop and ask one of the \"freelance graphic designers\" looking at Facebook on their laptops (because no one would admit to being one), so instead I turned to Carles, founder of Hipster Runoff and the de facto father/mother(?) of the whole hipster blogging movement. (S/he also wrote a post on the service.)\n\"There is no way that this web gimmick service can add any sort of value 2 any1's life,\" s/he tells us via e-mail. \"After the success of the hit Mark Zuckerbro mockumentary 'My Social Network\u2014Plz friend me and Tag Me In Fotos,' more people than ever are trying to start web startups that will not only make them rich, but also make them global icons. It seems as thought the era of 'people starting buzzbands' 2 be relevant, rich, &amp; famous is over, and the era of 'starting bloggable web startups' has begun. I am positive that this CEO has visions of a 'Groupon-like valuation,' but it is more likely that this initial wave of blog coverage will be the only value that 'Hipster.biz' will be able to cultivate.\"\nSo that's a \"no,\" then.\nImage courtesy of Flickr, Jack Newton"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/01/12/hipster/>