Although they announced it at this year's WWDC, Apple's upcoming OS X Lion AirDrop feature wasn't officially theirs to name until June 17, when the company legally acquired the use of the trademark from Urban Airship. The DropBox-like service will allow users to share files with each other wirelessly.
Urban Airship, which offers various connectivity and messaging services to developers of mobile apps, was only recently allowed the certificate of registration themselves before Apple swooped in to snap it up. While it's likely that there wouldn't have been any sort of battle over the name, Jobs and company certainly cut it very close this time around.
In related news, Apple has also filed for the name Photo Stream in Canada, which may serve as its priority filing for other countries should the need arise. Photo Stream is the iCloud service that will allow a user's photo collection to be synced across their computers and iDevices simultaneously.
Via PatentlyApple
ilikeimac
June 20, 2011 at 4:12pm
AirDrop isn't really like Dropbox, except that (1) both use the word "drop" and (2) they can be used to send someone a file (but so can email, BitTorrent, FTP, and thumb drives).
