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I moved from England to Sweden in 1997, and tried to setup an internet-design company there, in a time before it was a tech and startup hub. I wanted to have Future in my company name, and applied to the authority that decided this (PRV) with a string of alternatives: I remember FutureDeluxe and FutureLab as two favorites - and because at that time the process involved requesting some special papers, which one filled-in then returned and waited 5 or 6 weeks for an answer that came back in the post, in the meantime I would buy the .com domain for each of these series of names. So for a year after that I held maybe 6 or 7 domains with Future in the name, all of which I allowed to lapse and have since become websites for established companies.

The short story is that I’d get a form denial for each attempt to use Future, but without any specified reason. A few months later the national phone company launched a new service which they called The Department of the Future - and it suddenly became clear to me why all my names had been denied.

Still feel some bitterness that such an obvious and generic word could be trade-marked - especially as it was an English word and English wasn’t as widespread in Sweden back then as it is now.

Needless to say (for anyone familiar with Telia) Department of the Future was a business failure.