Talk:PMD Technologies

Company name
The company name is pmdtechnologies or (preferably) pmdtechnologies. It is always written with a lowercase first letter (just like eBay or iPod). Ref:

Why isn't it possible to keep this? Why don't you check the references before reverting edits that were made by people who know what they were doing, in good faith, and using a legitimate template for a lowercase title? 217.24.206.253 (talk) 10:49, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

I only wanted to change the name of the company to the correct format, and admins and bots turn this into a battlefield. Please clean up this mess. Pmdwiki (talk) 14:33, 21 July 2015 (UTC)


 * See Manual_of_Style/Trademarks, which makes it clear that Wikipedia uses the form "Pmdtechnologies". Pam  D  15:23, 21 July 2015 (UTC)


 * Yeah, but that's not how the name is composed. If by any means necessary you could revert it to "PMDTechnologies (stylized as...)" but not to "Pmdtechnologies" because the acronym would be "PMD", whereas "Pmd" is not a word. Pmdwiki (talk) 15:37, 21 July 2015 (UTC)


 * Company name is "pmdtechnologies gmbh" (all lowercase!), stylized as "pmdtechnologies gmbh". Reference: http://www.pmdtec.com/, scroll down to bottom
 * The acronym for the device/technology is "PMD" (for Photonic Mixer Device, all caps, also in "PMD technology").
 * Please update content based on new references:
 * (Project Tango: Qualcomm smartphone with ToF sensor by pmd)
 * (latest ToF camera design)
 * (ToF camera reference design)
 * (ToF camera reference design)
 * (IFM becomes 100% shareholder of pmd)
 * (website for ToF sensor co-development with Infineon)
 * (time-of-flight based industrial position sensors by IFM with PMD technology)
 * Regarding the "advertising language" and missing references, I am sure it could be rephrased without deleting facts. Please consider tagging individual issues before removing content. — Preceding unsigned comment added by pmdwiki (talk • contribs)


 * We cannot use blogs as sources and in any case none of this content is notable enough for inclusion. Theroadislong (talk) 17:40, 21 July 2015 (UTC)


 * With the same reasoning you'd have to remove half of the citations, let's say on the Apple page: blogs, Mac expert forums, news sources that just repost Apple press releases or act on behalf of Apple (not to mention the dead links). I have no problem with Apple getting a lot of buzz, I picked it just as an example for differently handled criteria.Noaffiliation (talk) 07:09, 22 July 2015 (UTC)


 * please read MOS:TM more closely. The reason Wikipedia doesn't choose to style company names as the companies wish is to help the reader: "Pmdtechnologies" is a proper noun, and is distinguished as such in English by an initial capital letter. "PMDTechnologies" also does this, but isn't reflected in the usage found in reliable sources (i.e. your company uses "pmdtechnologies" all lower case; we can't just make up our own style, which would border in Wikipedia policy as "WP:OR"), and is also "camel case" which is also discouraged in MOS:TM.
 * As User:PamD and User:Theroadislong have pointed out, we're making this article follow Wikipedia policy; if you have a problem with this policy then raise it (ideally with a constructive alternative suggestion, while pointing to this discussion and mentioning your affiliation to this company) at WT:MOSTM rather than here. Following on about WP:COI, see (edit:) the new section on your talk page. &#8209;&#8209; mjgilson T 22:32, 21 July 2015 (UTC)


 * I understand the policy, but "Pmdtechnologies" is *not* English. It is not one word although the capitalization would suggest it. Noaffiliation (talk) 07:09, 22 July 2015 (UTC)

So who is cleaning up this mess if I'm not allowed to? As I mentioned all I did was change the name and logo, and I was punished with big signs essentially saying "This article (and/or the company) is shit".Noaffiliation (talk) 07:09, 22 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Added a message to your talk page; your apparent COI edits alerted us to the problems inherent in the article, which readers are now aware of. I'm willing to work with you if you are to constructively address these problems. &#8209;&#8209; mjgilson T 15:30, 22 July 2015 (UTC)


 * I have nominated the article for deletion, which if successful, will make this discussion obsolete. I started cleaning up the page and reviewing the proposed edits, but I didn't find any sources that met the requirements for an organization to qualify for an articles as outlined at WP:CORP. Specifically, we require at least two in-depth profiles on the organization in credible, independent sources, such as national-level press articles written by professional journalists. It's very unlikely that a company of this size would qualify. If you feel two in-depth, independent profiles exist, it would be useful to share them at that discussion CorporateM (Talk) 04:47, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

More references (fixing broken links, some are or new): Noaffiliation (talk) 07:04, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Overview of 3D sensor technologies with mention of pmd
 * Report in major journal of image processing on basic PMD principle
 * FAZ article on Deutscher Zukunftspreis
 * Website Deutscher Zukunftspreis
 * Frost & Sullivan Award
 * Hermes Award 2005
 * Hermes Award 2005

New references
Pixelatrix (talk) 07:17, 11 August 2015 (UTC)
 * and "3D sensor for more comfort and safety", report in German automotive magazine (German)
 * "Strahlende Zukunft", report in VDI Nachrichten (German)
 * eetimes report on Infineon/pmd co-development
 * In-depth report on nominees for Zukunftspreis in scientific journal (German)
 * In-depth report on pmd in major German newspaper (German)
 * pmd design center in Dresden (press release)
 * ditto, by IEE (the selling company)
 * pmd @ Silicon Saxony
 * pmd Camboard Nano in NASA robots
 * ditto
 * ditto, in NASA document
 * Global 3D Sensor Market 2014-2020 – Technology, Type, Application and Geographic Trends & Forecasts

Pixelatrix (talk) 12:22, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Article in Laser Focus World on emerging 3D technologies
 * Article in Laser Focus World on time-of-flight sensors
 * Article in Photonics Spectra on security applications using 3D techonology, with several mentions of pmd
 * Touchless sensing and gesture recognizion market report
 * Motion sensor market report
 * Article on pmd project with Audi
 * Article on industrial image processing with special mentions of pmd

Lenovo Phab 2 pro
Infineon and pmd are development partners and suppliers of Lenovo's Phab 2 pro. Pixelatrix (talk) 09:48, 15 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Article in Handelsblatt
 * Breakdown of Lenovo TechWorld presentation, see 13:08
 * tech blog entry
 * Image Sensor Blog entry

Technology Innovation Award 2016 by Frost & Sullivan
Pixelatrix (talk) 13:06, 6 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Press release

Legal form changed to AG
The legal form has been switched from GmbH to AG. Source: [Company website footer] Pixelatrix (talk) 11:14, 26 January 2016 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the update; changes made. &#8209;&#8209; Yodin T 13:20, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

Requested move 6 March 2016

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: Moved  &mdash; Amakuru (talk) 10:13, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Pmdtechnologies → PMD Technologies – (or → PMDTechnologies if the WP:RS consistently do elide the space, which is dubious). Per MOS:TM, and thousands of already fixed article titles:  It's Adidas not "adidas", AT&T not "at&t", Sony not "SONY", Burger King not "BURGER KING", Alien 3 not Alien3, Macy's not "macy&#9733;s", etc., etc., etc. Also per MOS:ACRONYM. I would speedy this, but it's an open question whether the spacing should be collapsed in this this way the company uses in its logo. It should only be done if the sources pretty much overwhelmingly do it, since it's confusing and hard to read. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  07:19, 6 March 2016 (UTC)


 * Support: I'd looked at this in light of MOS:TM before, and came to the conclusion the name should be "Pmdtechnologies", but as RS tend to use "PMD Technologies", this is the best option. ‑‑ Yodin T 12:56, 6 March 2016 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Change Title
I am working for this company. Please change the title of this article to pmdtechnologies, as we are known by our customers, business partners and employees. We have tried this several times now, but the volunteers here, keep changing the name to the wrong spelling. In case we are not to be mixed up with other companies that also have "pmd" in their name, it is important that all letters of the company name are written in lower case. Just as we are officially registered in the commercial register. Thanks in advance! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pmdtechnologiesag (talk • contribs) 14:25, 16 September 2020 (UTC)

Requested move 16 September 2020

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion. 

The result of the move request was: Procedural close. Nominator has requested withdrawal due to unanimous opposition. (closed by non-admin page mover)   SITH   (talk)   17:53, 23 September 2020 (UTC)

PMD Technologies → Pmdtechnologies – The situation has changed some since 2016. WP:COMMONNAME suggests the page should be moved. A "Google" search found about twice as many results for pmdtechnologies ( 76,000+ results) than "PMD Technologies" (, 30,000+ results) even after subtracting out several terms likely to pollute the results. When I restricted the results to the past year, the numbers were a bit closer, over 130 for "pdmtechnologies" but just under 100 for "PMD Technologies." While both sets of results were dominated by unreliable or first-party sources, the sheer ratio strongly suggests that a move is appropriate. Had it not been for the 2016 discussion, I wouldn've just boldly moved the page. As an aside, the difficulty in finding the reliable sources among the search results would make it harder to support this company's notability (see WP:CORP) but that's not what this discussion is about. You were involved in the previous discussion or page move back in 2016. See above. davidwr/ (talk)/(contribs)  17:34, 16 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Are ghits really the best way of determining this?  O.N.R.  (talk) 18:22, 16 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Best, no, efficient, yes, likely to get an accurate result? Yes.  I'm open to other ways to efficiently determine this.  davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  19:19, 16 September 2020 (UTC)

— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:41, 23 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Google's results are not going to be representative of what's used in independent sources, and since 76,000 and 30,000 are within the same order or magnitude they are about the same (yes Ghits are that unreliable). It appears this stylization is used in press releases, but not by secondary sources (none of these are high quality sources though) so I'm leaning oppose. – Thjarkur (talk) 09:00, 17 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose This is more about the desires of the marketing department of the company, than improvement of the encyclopaedia. Theroadislong (talk) 09:09, 17 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose per Theroadislong, Thjarkur, O.N.R., and MOS:TM: Ghit counts are not a good proxy for independent high-quality English-language reliable sources. —BarrelProof (talk) 23:13, 17 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose per MOS:TM, MOS:ABBR, MOS:CAPS, and WP:OFFICIALNAME. At first, I thought a move to PMDTechnologies might be plausible; WP is tolerant of camelcase and "RunTogetherNames" in trademarks when consistently used by reliable sources (see, e.g. DaimlerChrysler), but not of "ALLCAPS LTD" or "all lower-case, inc." font-styling shenanigans (see MOS:TM on this in particular: we use Sony and Macy's, not "SONY" and "macy's", much less "macy★s"; an exception like iPhone requires near-universal consistency in reliable sources that are independent of the trademark holder).  However, the company itself does not consistently use "PMDTechnologies" (even stylized as "pmdtechnologies"), and most often refers to itself as "PMD" (lately stylized as "pmd"), ergo the "PMD" part and the "Technologies" part are severable, so should be severed – the central MoS principle is never apply an optional stylization of any kind unless it overwhelmingly dominates in sources.  Going over their website in detail, I see that just "pmd" by itself is used by them at about a 20:1 ratio over "pmdtechnologies" (and sometimes they also use "pmdtech", even aside from their domain name); so, there is no WP:ABOUTSELF argument to make here.  They do other silly things with trademark stylization that WP would never accept, e.g "pmd[Vision]", and writing their marketing catchphrase sentence "can you imagine?" without a leading capital letter.  I guess it's cute (and clearly intended to appeal to the young SMS-addicted crowd), but it's not encyclopedic. Furthermore, just doing a random Google search is meaningless, since most of the results are not reliable sources.  Do a Google News search (while it also includes some unreliable sources like press-release regurgitation, it is dominated by actual news publishers).  "PMD Technologies" returns about 3000 results, virtually none of which use lower-case "pmd" .  Meanwhile, "PMDTechnologies" returns only about 1800 results, with a mix of styles including "PMDTechnologies", "pmdtechnologies", "Pmdtechnologies", "PMDtechnologies", etc. . That's a 5:3 ratio (60%) ratio in favor of the split version (probably more like 55% due to some false positives, and the run-together versions don't form a 40–45% block, because they are different, i.e. each variant is something like 20% or 5% or whatever). Worse for the "pmd" case, a large number of instances using lower case are regurgitation of press releases, and many of those that are not are slavishly mimicking trademark stylization in ways that WP never would, so cannot be considered reliable on this question. (E.g. they do things like: "ESPROS Photonics, Microsoft, Eyesight Technologies Ltd., Cognivue, Gestsure Technologies Ltd., Elliptic Laboratories A/S,., Cognitec Systems GmbH, North Inc., Crossmatch, Microchip Technology Inc., Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., XYZ Interactive, pmdtechnologies ag, OBLONG INDUSTRIES, INC, MetaSensor Inc., GESTURE RESEARCH, PointGrab Inc., OmniVision Technologies, Inc., Infineon Technologies AG" – lots of SCREAMING ALL-CAPS marketing, inconsistent treatment of abbreviations ("Inc." then "INC", "AG" then "ag"), and they illustrate a lot of other capitalization problems (e.g. "the Gesture Recognition and Touchless Sensing Market", which is not a proper name and should contain no capital letters at all.)  A Google Books search does not report numbers of hits, but shows a similar pattern: lots of consistent "PMD Technologies" without font stylization gimickery (though I did see one aberrant "pmd technologies" result, which matches neither the trademark stylization nor normal English treatment of acronyms and company names) . But there is very inconsistent treatment of the run-together version; I see "PMDTechnologies" dominating, with "pmdtechnologies" a distant second .  Google Scholar results are similar. The "PMD Technologies" search brings up 689 hits, and the stylization is consistent as "PMD Technologies" . A "PMDTechnologies" search yields 615 journal results, again inconsistent (I saw "Pmdtechnologies", "PMDTECHNOLOGIES", and "PmdTechnologies" in there, even just skimming quickly), with "PMDTechnologies" clearly and strongly dominating over "pmdtechnologies" . The counts for the space-separated version are slightly inflated by false positives for the phrase "PMD technologies" meaning "technologies pertaining to PMD", which has multiple technical meanings as an acronym; that's why I said above that the ratio is probably more like 55% than 60% in the news hits.  This all leads inevitably to "PMD Technologies" as the WP article title.  While WP:COMMONNAME is is not a style policy and never has been, MoS would be happy to a defer to an unusual stylization  it completely dominated in reliable sources.  Here, however, we have proof that neither stylization – not the run-togetherness nor the lower-casing, much less a combination of both – is applied in sources with anything approaching consistency (it's not even a bare majority usage).  The form "pmdtechnologies" is  the most common rendition of this company's name, and even the company itself isn't consistent on the run-togetherness part. Ultimately, this is essentially the same case as "macy's": the fact that the company consistently uses lower case in marketing materials is meaningless unless almost all independent sources ape that stylization (as they do with "iPhone").
 * As nominator, I have no objections to a regular close or even a SNOW close by an uninvolved/neutral editor now that it's been a week. Unless someone chimes in "in support" I have no objections to any editor who is otherwise eligible to close discussions but for being "involved" closing this as "SNOW/Withdrawn by nominator" on my behalf. That latter option for involved editors including those who have participated in this discussion to "SNOW/withdraw on my behalf" only exists as long as there are no other editors making statements in support.  I'm not expecting any such statements, but as a formality I think someone other than me should close it. davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  17:28, 23 September 2020 (UTC)


 * The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.