If you haven’t heard by now, Microsoft has renamed SkyDrive to OneDrive – after it lost a court battle with British satellite broadcaster BSkyB over the name. And while we assume Microsoft’s lawyers have vetted this name to make sure it doesn’t happen again, it should be noted that Microsoft is not the only company to be using the OneDrive name.
For instance, it is the name of a bolt designed by an Australian company called Zipbolt (see above). Called the OneDrive 15.200, the part is – according to the official website – “a fully self contained one piece connector with a self exiting screw shaft and is specifically designed for the users of CNC routers/nesting machines.” It also offers considerable time saving during assembly.
As well, there is a product called OneDrive from an Austin-based company called KLD Energy. It is a propulsion and generation system for electric vehicles, promising up to 2x range compared to other products while also being efficient. And it’s already in use today, according to KLD Energy. For instance, KFC Malaysia’s delivery bikes are running on OneDrive.
There is also a Portuguese car parts importer and distributor, who is also called OneDrive. Their website doesn’t say much about the company itself, but it does have four locations all over Portugal. The image on the right is their store in Porto, the country’s second-largest city after Lisbon.
ONEDrive is also the name of upcoming software from DataONE – or the Data Observation Network for Earth. Supported by the National Science Foundation in the US, DataONE was established to archive ecological and environmental research data produced worldwide. ONEDrive is being developed by DataONE to allow scientists to access data like a remote file system.
In New Zealand, OneDrive is a car-rental service for businesses that are members of OneFocus – which is now the Universal Business Team as the OneFocus domain now redirects to the UBT website. The service is provided by AVIS. We’re not going to link to the page (despite the fact you can find it on Google, if you really wanted to) because it looks like to be an members-only page and we’re not entirely sure if the partnership continues.
There is also an API called OneDrive that is available on GitHub. Developed by a Singaporean developer named Kajal Sinha, OneDrive is a framework API where – according to Sinha – “all Cloud Services (SkyDrive, DropBox, Box, Google Drive etc) lands up and provide a common interface to which a client system can interact.” It still has bugs and requires extra effort to connect it with any other provider that isn’t SkyDrive/OneCloud, but is available for all.
And finally, here’s something very interesting. There WAS a cloud storage service called OneDrive in Brazil. This service was provided by Locaweb, a local web hosting company. However, it suddenly changed its name to GoDrive. And we know the change was recent because the service was still called OneDrive on January 23 this year, thanks to the Internet Archive.
This is pure speculation, but Microsoft must have bought the name from Locaweb in order to ensure it could use the name OneDrive in the country, otherwise it would have to call it something different in Brazil. That has happened before: Google was forced to rename Gmail to Google Mail in Germany because of a trademark dispute (it has since been resolved).