The Etymology of "Folio"

When you read the word "folio," what immediately comes to mind? If you're a librarian or an avid book reader, you might think of a book printed on the large size paper called folio pages. If you're a typeface designer, you might think of the sans-serif typeface. If you're a hotel manager, you might think of an invoice or a bill. For the majority of the rest of the world, you probably think of it as being a shortened form of "portfolio." The strongest and most likely association is going to come with portfolio, as it is the most common of these uses. A portfolio defines an individual, and we here at foliopod want that to be what happens with each and every folio that we develop.

Whether it is an artist's body of works, a company's past projects, or an individuals online identity, the folio is a personalized and customized definition of its respective owner.

Why "Pod"?

When we were thinking up a name for our company, we were pretty set on using "folio" but leaving it just at that is too brief and generic. We started going through a lot of ideas, until we started thinking about how we wanted to present our projects. We realized that we wanted something unique yet familiar. With as many pod-related things that exist in today's technological corridor, we decided that it would bring a sense of familiarity while allowing us to branch off in our own direction without seeming like we were just jumping on a bandwagon.

Instead of going with the traditional theme of pod, which usually relates to podcasts, we thought of it more as the individual seed pods that various plants have. Each of our projects is like a seed pod for us: a new opportunity for growth and development.

Data portability in today's world is important. It's really important. With all of the social aggregation tools that are out there today, it reminds us that we have a distinct need for a semantic web, and we look at each bit of data contributed to any project as belonging to its own pod. To further substantiate the interconnectivity of these various pods, we want to make it accessible to anyone and everyone. We want to merge organic user experiences with established microformats (like XFN, hCard, vCard, etc), web standards (we are big proponents of the WaSP initiatives), and the semantic web (our major internal projects are hopefully going to create substantial additions to the existing semantic web databases out there).