Date   : Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:28:56 +0100
From   : philb@... (Phil Blundell)
Subject: A new Element 14

On Mon, 2009-07-20 at 15:11 +0100, me@... wrote:
> On 20 Jul 2009, at 14:07, Ian Wolstenholme wrote:
> 
> > Not much hope of a revival of our favourite computer company though!
> 
> How much money would every member of the BBC Micro list have to cough  
> up in order to re-purchase the name and re-start Acorn? ;)

Well... both the name "Acorn Computers Limited" and the old Acorn
trademark now seem to belong to a new company, 05690546.  They have a
website@...; the old acorn.co.uk domain now seems to
belong to a chap called Tom McFarlane.

It seems fairly unlikely that the new owners of the name and trademark
would want to part with them, given that they've obviously expended some
effort to get hold of them in the first place and that losing their name
would presumably be a nuisance for their business.  So you could well
end up spending a large sum to buy them out.

Then, to re-start the company, hire staff and actually do something
useful would require another stack of money.  Obviously, how much would
depend on what you wanted to do, but to get back into something
resembling the kind of business that Acorn were previously in would
probably require ?1million or so at a minimum.

So, if there are say 50 active users on the list you'd perhaps be
looking at something roughly on the order of ?30,000 each.  I don't
imagine you would get all that many takers for that opportunity. :-}

p.