Pro Tools, as many of you may know, is the industry-standard creative software suite for musicians.

It’s also the name of the latest product from 99designs, the crowdsourced spec work site for getting creative work done on the cheap.

Pro Tools is a digital audio platform for Mac and Windows made by Avid and first released in 1991, according to Wikipedia. It’s in just about every professional audio/video setup. Ad agencies often have in-house A/V specialists and Pro Tools experts whose only job is to edit audio using Pro Tools.

According to 99designs, Pro Tools is a digital software suite for ad agencies to find freelancers and work with clients. While it’s unlikely that there’s any overlap between the functions of the two products, we’re confused as to why 99designs would choose a name — and not a great name, at that — that was already so closely aligned with another company’s software.

And that’s the kind of confusion that leads to trademark lawsuits.

“We’re aware of that product and aren’t concerned as we don’t see any legal or other problematic issues arising there,” a 99designs rep wrote to VentureBeat this morning in an email.

However, the Avid reps we contacted might see some legal or other problematic issues arising there. They’re looking into the situation now and promised to get back to us shortly.

The 99design folks did not contact Avid prior to the launch; our contact said that after discussing the matter internally, the team decided to proceed with the launch and not pursue a trademark for the name.

99designs also would make the point that its software is for a different industry — ads, not music. However, given the number of Pro Tools editor positions at ad agencies, a fair argument could be made to the contrary.

A bit more about the 99designs version of Pro Tools: The company’s target audience of mid-sized to small web and marketing agencies are usually coming to 99designs to find freelance graphic design work. They are looking for fresh talent, but the site’s crowdsourced contest model means they get to see a lot of work from a lot of creatives for very little money before making their decision.

The new 99designs software suite includes invite-only contests to help agencies set a higher bar for crowdsourced submissions, presentation tools for working with clients, private and “blind” contests to keep IP on lock, and custom non-disclosure agreements to work better with careful clients and freelance designers.

All in all, it’s right in line with what 99designs already does. We just gotta ask: Couldn’t they have come up with a better name?

Totally objectively, “Pro Tools” is just a crap name for a product. It’s generic and vague. Heck, my face is a pro tool. The Internet is a pro tool. A jackhammer is a pro tool. The phrase “pro tool” in and of itself has absolutely no meaning — outside its now universally acknowledged meaning related to audio software.

And what about SEO? No search engine in the world is going to take a “Pro Tools” query and serve up a 99designs page.

Huh. Maybe they shoulda crowdsourced that.

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99designs, the crowdsourced design marketplace “real” designers love to hate, has acquired 12designer, the Berlin-based crowdsourced design marketplace that had become 99designs’ number-one rival in the European market.

The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but the multilingual 12designer team will become 99designs’ new European staff, including former 12designer CEO/current 99designs general manager for Europe Eva Missling.

Last year, 99designs raised a large first round of funding — $35 million, to be precise — from Facebook investor Accel Partners. The extra cash gave it a bit of leverage to do deals like this one, in which it’s scooped up 12designers’ 22,000-strong community of creatives.

Both sites work the same way: A brand, company, or individual submits a request for proposal. Creatives, from designers to branding folks to teenagers with their first stolen copy of Photoshop, compete with each other, submitting proposals and sketching out concepts quickly (this is the “spec work” part of the process that “real” designers find particularly odious, in case you were curious).

The winner of each bidding process/online contest gets to complete the work and get paid for their efforts according to the budget set out in the RFP. Results can vary widely, of course, but the concept works quite well for many startups, small businesses, and others who need quick, cheap design and branding help.

99designs is without question the larger of the two companies, currently boasting 1,490 open RFPs as compared to 12designer’s 113, and its design community is more than six times larger than 12designer’s. All things considered, the acquisition makes a lot of sense. In fact, it reminds us very much of Fab.com’s acquisition of its German clone, Casacanda, not too long ago.

And as the Fab/Casacanda acquisition was the offshoot of that company’s international ambitions and expansion plans, so too is this deal. Expect to see more 99designs growth in Europe. Currently, Germany is one of the company’s largest and fastest-growing markets outside English-speaking areas, and European customers make up roughly 15 percent of the company’s business.

The company’s hope is that the competitive spirit can produce new data analysis algorithms as well as it does logos and website designs.

Promulgated by sites like 99designs, the idea behind speculative work is that there are hordes of hungry creatives just raring for a chance at a job. A potential client stages a competition to determine who gets the contract. The creatives compete, each creating work specifically for the client, most wasting hours of time in the process.

For the client, however, it’s a win: They don’t risk anything on an unknown, and the result is often reasonably acceptable.

Kaggle is a new company that is bringing this concept — getting smart people to do specific work free of charge — from the creative industries into the sciences. The startup just announced an $11 million round of institutional funding, quite a large amount considering this is the company’s first round.

The funding was led by two stellar Silicon Valley firms, Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures. In addition, the company scored Max Levchin, a cofounder of PayPal and a Silicon Valley power player, as its chairman.

Kaggle lets organizations such as companies and governments, which have big questions and mountains of relevant data, to post their data and problems to the site, then stage a competition to see who can extract meaning from the data using an algorithm or two.

Data scientists then compete for prize money in return for their intellectual work. These scientists include a network of thousands of PhDs from fields including computer science, statistics, maths and physics. These people come from more than 200 universities in 100 countries around the world.

The scientists who don’t win the contests walk away empty-handed.

But Jeremy Howard, Kaggle’s president and chief scientist, says that isn’t as disappointing as it might sound.

“Most players don’t enter mainly for the cash prizes,” he wrote in an email to VentureBeat. “I competed very frequently on Kaggle prior to joining the company… and was never personally motivated by the money – and was never disappointed to not win. In fact, it was the competitions where I didn’t win that I learnt the most, because I then got to read the winning papers and learnt about what those people found that I missed.”

Kaggle says it has the ability to surface a wider variety of viable solutions. More heads are better than fewer, after all. But the entire model of spec work is a tad exploitative for some people’s tastes, not to say disrespectful of the time and expertise of the parties involved.

On the other hand, Kaggle’s PR reps and clients say it delivers cheap data analysis.

In addition to public competitions, the startup also conducts invitation-only competitions with access to data requiring non-disclosure agreements. For those competitions, the prizes will work more like the rewards for the top-placing athletes in a golf tournament, said Howard, with runners-up also receiving smaller sums.

“We expect to run more than 10,000 private competitions per year in the future and expect many data scientists will earn their income from this,” he said. “We hope to see the world’s best data scientists earning more than $25 million per year in this way.”

Vinod Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures, said this in a statement from Kaggle: “Kaggle’s platform has the potential to change the way we tackle data analysis problems… This is a fundamental shift in how we’ve traditionally looked at the multi-billion dollar market for data analytics. Add competition among the best scientists, their egos on a leaderboard, and large challenging problems, and you’ve got the perfect mix for stellar innovation.”