I heard a radio ad today here in the San Francisco bay area for TomatoVine, a “Next Generation Telephone Service” (they seem to avoid using the term “VoIP” anywhere in their marketing materials or web site). Maybe they’ve been around for awhile and I’m just now hearing of them, but I’m still scratching my head over their name and branding. What does a vegetable vine symbolize with regards to Internet telephony? That it’s going to grow fast? Well it sounded like TomatoVine is making a Vonage-like play for residential customers, with nearly identical features and pricing as the industry leader in consumer VoIP. If they’re going to have any success with that plan, I suspect we’ll be hearing a lot more commercials from them in the coming months. (And let me offer some unsolicited web design advice: the flash-based menu options jump around far too much for navigational comfort, giving an almost “Ha! you missed it, try again!” feeling when a menu item is selected).

Note: You can save your comments, I know tomatos are technically not a vegetable, but I’m sorry, to me they always will be. They just don’t fit into my world view of fruit.