Sometimes it takes a crazy kind of name to snap a name inspector out of a long dry spell. Verb for Shoe is just that kind of name. It belongs to a computerized, interactive shoe created by MIT-spinoff VectraSense Technologies. Apparently this shoe detects different activities of its wearer and inflates and deflates cushions in its insole to provide custom comfort and support. Part of The Name Inspector thinks “Wow!” and the other, larger, more sensible part is reminded of the old Onion headline: “U.S. Dentists Can’t Make Nation’s Teeth Any Damn Whiter“. Just exactly how comfortable can our feet get? $700 comfortable?

As he writes this, The Name Inspector is wearing a $90 pair of Keens, and his feet are just about as happy as they ever have been. But, to be fair, there’s more to the Verb for Shoe experience, apparently. According to talk2myShirt, these shoes are networked. Just why is a little unclear. Something about interacting with people in virtual and real space at the same time. But why through your shoes? So many questions, which at the time of this writing are not answered on the Verb for Shoe website.

But technology aside, the name Verb for Shoe is not only linguistically and conceptually bizarre, but it makes reference to grammatical categories as well. What could be better than that?

Verb for Shoe is a noun (verb) modified by a prepositional phrase (for shoe). But that prepositional phrase ain’t right. Normally a noun like shoe would be preceded by some kind of determiner: a shoe, the shoe, your shoe, etc. Determiners can be left out only in certain situations, like when the noun is plural (for shoes) or when it refers, concretely or abstractly, to an undifferentiated mass of stuff (for mud, for fun). The word shoe is neither a plural noun nor a mass noun. So what’s going on? When do you encounter a prepositional phrase like for shoe? Well, when you’re talking about words and their meanings, as in “What’s the word for shoe in French?”. In that sentence, shoe doesn’t refer to a shoe–it refers to the idea of a shoe.

So the name Verb for Shoe is about the idea of a shoe, or more specifically, changing our collective idea of a shoe. Why Verb for Shoe rather than Word for Shoe? Because we think of shoes as objects, but VectraSense wants us to think of this shoe as an occurrence. Verbs name actions and processes–hence, Verb for Shoe. You can imagine someone in a namestorming session saying, “What’s a verb for shoe? Whatever the verb for shoe is, that should be the name”. And then everyone realizes there is no verb for shoe, and they just go with the phrase that describes the mythical word they’re looking for. This is a very “meta” name.

A great thing about Verb for Shoe is that it gives The Name Inspector a reason to talk about notional (or conceptual) versus grammatical categories. The popular understanding of grammatical categories is that they express the notional ones. When you first learned about nouns and verbs, you probably learned that nouns are for people, places, and things and verbs are for actions. While the correlation between the two types of category is strong, linguists are always quick to point out that it’s imperfect, and that grammatical categories are best understood in morphosyntactic terms–that is, in terms of the kinds of suffixes that attach to words and the positions that words occupy in sentences.

How is the correlation between notional and grammatical categories imperfect? Well, while many nouns do refer to people, places, and things, there are also nouns, like fun, kiss, game, and trial, that name action- and event-like phenomena. And while many verbs name actions and processes, there are verbs like resemble, remain, and cost that name things less dynamic and/or more abstract.

The situation is actually kind of complicated, because different grammatical categories have different degrees of freedom to name different things. Nouns can name just about anything, because people have conceptual reasons to reify all kinds of phenomena that are not very thing-like. Verbs are more restricted than nouns–they never name people, places, and things, for example.

So how do you define nouns and verbs? You can’t do it right without mentioning things like this: Nouns are preceded by determiners and head noun phrases, which can be subjects of clauses. Verbs are marked for tense and aspect and head verb phrases, which join with noun phrases to make clauses. If this all seems a little circular, it is, in a way. Grammatical description is all about how systems hang together. And if it all seems a little a bit dry, well, it probably is. The strange and lucky subculture of language geeks, of which The Name Inspector is a proud member, is able to delight in this kind of grammatical detail. Others find it hard to stand, even if they’re standing in $700 networked shoes.

Tags: verb for shoe, the name verb for shoe, shoes, wearable computers, wearable computing, wearable electronics, grammatical categories, syntactic categories, verbs, nouns, grammar

Word travels fast on the web. That can be a big boon to a business, but it has its down side as well. Consider Blews.

This is the name of a news aggregator being developed at Microsoft Research. It not only displays news stories, but also shows how much they’re being discussed in blogs from the political left and right. And it does automatic sentiment analysis to determine the “emotional charge” of the associated blog posts. It’s not even an actual product yet–it’s a research project. But here it is being discussed by Michael Arrington on TechCrunch, almost as if it were a web startup’s beta.

The problem with Blews is not the technology, which Arrington finds promising, but the name. In the slow old days, this in-house project name would probably never have made it into the wide world. But thanks to the web and influencers like Arrington, it threatens to become a brand.

Arrington is careful to point out that the creators of Blews are not UI experts or web designers, implying that readers should not judge the idea too harshly from a user experience perspective. The same sort of slack should be cut, The Name Inspector supposes, for the name. (A name is, after all, a part of the user experience. It might not affect the way a user decides where to click, but it affects the way a user remembers an app, thinks about it, bookmarks it, and tells others about it.)

So perhaps it’s not fair to pick nits. On the other hand, there’s a value to getting criticism early in the process, right?

This is a pretty bad name. Presumably it’s a blend: Blogs + news = Blews. It also alludes to the use of colors to represent the political spectrum: red for conservative and blue for liberal (and purple for those mixed-up areas). The GUI uses the colors red, white and blue in a way that makes it, as Arrington points out, a dead ringer for a sideways Rocket Pop.

But there are three big problems with the name Blews. First, people are likely to modify it with Microsoft, on the pattern of Microsoft Word. The result sounds like “Microsoft Blues”, which does make a pretty good name for the malaise experienced by the characters in Douglas Coupland’s novel Microserfs, before they started working at that virtual Lego startup in California and got all confident and fit and sexed up, but not for an innovative web technology from the software giant.

Second, there’s the unfortunate but inevitable evocation of the phrase “Microsoft blows” (or the slightly less negative “Microsoft blew”, which at least leaves open the possibility that Microsoft no longer blows). Some TechCrunch commenters picked right up on that.

Third, Blews looks like a violation of grammar: a third person singular present tense ending stuck onto an irregular past tense verb. It’s the linguistic equivalent of biting on tinfoil.

Let The Name Inspector make it clear that he finds nothing less interesting than gratuitous Microsoft bashing. He knows nice, smart people who work there. He’s just saying that it’s a mistake to give the haters this kind of raw material. The Name Inspector stands always at the ready to help people avoid this kind of situation.

Tags: blews, the name blews, microsoft blews, the name microsoft blews, microserfs, coupland, douglas coupland, legos, sentiment analysis

After a brief scare, The Name Inspector is happy to report that his WordPress installation is up-do-date, his blog spam-free, and his musings back in Google search results. Something at Google is working very efficiently, whether it’s the crawl or the appeal process, and The Name Inspector appreciates that.

The Name Inspector is reaching out to regular readers with a warning and a plea. It will be mostly regular readers reading this, because The Name Inspector has been dropped from Google search results. Until recently this site was among the top ten or so results for searches on “company names” and “naming”, and now it’s missing from those results entirely.

It turns out The Name Inspector has been the victim of a spam-injection attack on his WordPress blog. Hidden links were appearing in the footer, and they were picked up by Google’s crawler and got in the index. Now the blog is being penalized.

If you run WordPress and have noticed a big drop in Google traffic, you should know about this. Check your wp-includes directory for the following file: class-mail.php. That’s not a legitimate Wordpress file–if you have it, you’ve been attacked. Details about this Wordpress vulnerability can be found in the support forum, but the first thing you need to do is upgrade to the most recent version.

Now on to the plea. Though The Name Inspector has appealed to Google for “reinclusion” and will presumably have the penalty lifted (as long as the problem is gone), this whole distasteful experience will probably have negative longer-term effects on his search engine visibility. Many of you have linked to this site already, and The Name Inspector thanks you. Those who enjoy the blog but haven’t linked to it on your own blogs, please consider doing it now. Maybe point to this cautionary post. Or one that’s actually interesting. Help replenish The Name Inspector’s Google juice.

And now, this site will be down temporarily while The Name Inspector upgrades.

Seattle 2.0 says The Name Inspector is one of the most influential entrepreneur-bloggers of Seattle. Number 4, to be exact. That’s right, The fourth most influential entrepreneur-blogger in Seattle! The Name Inspector can already feel the power working its way to his extremities. Marcelo Calbucci, the brains behind Seattle 2.0, said in his notification email that this honor lies somewhere between being on the Fortune 50 list of top bloggers and being The Name Inspector’s mom’s favorite blogger.

Thanks Marcelo! Hi mom!

Tags: top blogs, top bloggers, a-list bloggers, seattle bloggers, seattle blogs, seattle a-list, seattle 2.0, seattle2.0, seattle, awesomeness

Withoutabox

The Internet Movie Database, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, recently acquired a film distribution company called Withoutabox. Amazon.com has a digital movie download service called Unbox. These names just make too cute a pair for The Name Inspector to ignore, and bring up some grammatical issues that he expects will delight and amuse you. OK, he hopes they won’t bore you to desperate tears. Please bear with him.

Let’s start with the basics. In The Name Inspector’s typology of names, Withoutabox is a phrase name. A prepositional phrase, more specifically. Without is the preposition, and a box is a noun phrase that serves as its object.

To think about the meanings of a phrase name, you need to consider not only the meanings of the words in the phrase and how they go together, but also the ways that the phrase as a whole might be used in a sentence. This is especially true of prepositional phrases, because the main function of a preposition is to make it clear how its noun phrase object fits into a larger context.

Semantically speaking, the function of without is to indicate absence–in this case, of a box. Grammatically, without can connect that absence-of-a-box meaning to a larger context in two main ways: as an adverbial (a modifier of a verb or verb phrase), or as a postnominal modifier (a modifier of a noun that occurs after the noun). An example of the adverbial use of without a box is “Distribute your movies without a box”, where it modifies the distributing. An example of the postnominal modifier use is “This is a movie without a box”, where it modifies the movie.

In this context the two interpretations amount to more or less the same thing. As the website states, “Withoutabox declares all members of the film community to be free from restrictive distribution channels”. One aspect of this freedom is the fact that members do not have to put a film or tape or disc into a box and load it on a truck in order to get it in front of viewers. So the name Withoutabox works mainly through metonymy: it focuses on a small, literally descriptive detail–the idea or image of a movie that’s not in a box–and uses it to stand for a much larger scenario–a distribution system that’s not constrained by physical distance and scarcity.

Withoutabox has a hint of metaphorical meaning, too. The name is reminiscent of the phrase outside the box, that tired cliché that many of us–especially business types–drag out when we want to encourage innovative thinking. (Nothing is deeper inside the box than the phrase outside the box.)

The Name Inspector doesn’t know for certain how this cliché got started. There’s the obvious use of a centrality metaphor for normalcy, with normal being in the middle, as in middle of the road, and abnormal being out there, marginal, edgy, on the fringes, etc. There’s also a related containment metaphor, in which being inside the container is conforming to group behavior, and being outside is being different. But The Name Inspector read somewhere that the phrase think outside the box actually relates to an old brain teaser involving a square made out of nine dots drawn on a piece of paper. The idea is that you’re supposed to draw lines through all the dots by making only four lines and not lifting your pen from the paper.

Remember, think outside the box!

Though Withoutabox is kind of a long name, it has a fast, familiar pronunciation, similar to that expression of confident certainty without a doubt, that’s encouraged by the spaceless orthography.

Unbox

The name Unbox is deceptively simple. It seems to be shorter version of Withoutabox, providing a straightforward description of one aspect of downloadable movies in order to highlight the benefits of digital distribution.

But wait a minute. The prefix un- usually attaches to a verb (undo, unwind, etc.) or an adjective (unkind, unacceptable, etc.) to make a syntactically similar word with the opposite meaning. The most natural way to interpret Unbox is as a verb meaning ‘to take out of a box’ (comparable to the verb uncage ‘to take or let out of a cage’).

A verb prefixed with un- usually denotes the reversal of the action denoted by the unprefixed verb. You can wrap something and unwrap it, tie something and untie it, and so forth. So the verbs that un- attaches to denote actions with results that can be reversed.

In this context, however, unbox is being used, at least on the most literal level, in reference to something that has never been in a box–namely, a downloadable digital movie. So the name Unbox is less direct than it first appears: it evokes an imaginary scenario of taking something out of a box in order to emphasize the absence of a box and all that implies. If the name were Unboxed, this wouldn’t be the case. The past participle unboxed can simply describe something that you might expect to be in a box but isn’t. With adjectives and past participles (that is, adjectives made out of verbs), un- basically means ‘not’ (uncool, undisclosed, unanticipated, etc.). Something can be unguarded even though you can’t unguard it. But Unbox requires us to imagine an act of unboxing. We might think of this name as more of a philosophical exhortation than a physical description. Free yourself from the tyranny of the box!

So even the meaning of an unassuming name like Unbox requires you to use your imagination a little bit.

Entrepreneur and longtime reader Rich Skrenta has a search start-up called Blekko (click on that link and say hi!). It was covered on TechCrunch, and then Rich wrote a follow-up blog post telling the story of the name Blekko and asking for The Name Inspector’s input.

OK, here goes. Obviously Blekko is a ridiculous name and Rich knows it. He says in his post that it was chosen as the funniest of a number of options. He claims that one vendor told him the name was fantastic and must not be changed, but admits that those comments might have been intended ironically. He also hints that part of the reason he even got written up on TechCrunch was because of the silly name.

Comments on the TechCrunch post, when they address the name at all, are uniformly negative. Someone says the name sounds like retching. Another asks if they went with Blekko because blechbarf.com wasn’t available.

Rich writes that he spoke to some naming firms and they told him that, despite some negative phonetic associations, the name Blekko is essentially an empty vessel.

Oh, how The Name Inspector hates the expression empty vessel. The implication of calling a name an “empty vessel” is that you can fill it up with whatever meaning you want. That’s such a silly branding cliche.

Of course, the way a company name is ultimately perceived will depend on what people know, believe and feel about the company it’s attached to, and that’s going to depend on lots of other things. A good name for a company that fails will come to seem not so good. A silly name for a wildly successful company–Google comes to mind–will start to seem like pure naming genius.

Some people conclude from this that names don’t matter. That’s faulty reasoning. If a company made bad hiring decisions, but prevailed anyway due to its kick-ass technology, you wouldn’t say that hiring doesn’t matter. All companies do some things right and some things wrong, and their ultimate success depends on the complex interaction of all those little successes and failures.

The point of a name is that it’s there from the beginning, and can influence the way people feel about your company before they know anything else about it. Even when names are not obviously meaningful, they remind people of words, and invite them to make relevant connections, perhaps only subconsciously, between the meanings of those words and the company in question.

So, do you want those associations to make things easier or harder?

There are, of course, different ways a name can help you. If you want to blend into the background, it can help you do that. If you want to be provocative to get some attention, a name can help with that, too.

But after the attention dies down, you still have the name. Then it should be able to help you in other ways. If you’re lucky enough to do everything else right, your silly name may not be a hindrance. But if you make some missteps along the way, a silly name will make people less forgiving. What did you expect, they’ll say, from a company named Blekko?

So what, exactly, is wrong with the name Blekko? It’s not a mystery. It sounds like an exclamation of disgust, usually written as blech, that may represent vomiting onomatopoetically. As The Name Inspector likes to pronounce it, blech ends with a voiceless uvular or velar fricative, but the k sound in Blekko is a close approximation.

If you search for blech on Google, you’ll mostly find pages where it’s used as a surname or as a German or Yiddish word. If you search on Technorati, however, you’ll find lots of examples like this:

Blech. Sucks gettin’ old, I tell ya.

I also used fat free cheese, which I wouldn’t recommend using. Blech!

I absolutely abhorred mopping the floor. It was futile. There was so much grease and gunk and nasty on the floor, you just schmeared it everywhere. blech!

Rich, if you’re not comfortable naming your company Yukko, it’s safe to say you shouldn’t call it Blekko, either.

But you’re in stealth mode. The Name Inspector believes you have no intention of launching as Blekko. Though he hopes he’s wrong.

Tags: blekko, the name blekko, blech, blech! exclamations

The Name Inspector just learned about Incesoft, which claims on its website to be “the world’s leading provider of web robot technology”. Now, this is a Chinese company (which was selected for inclusion on the 2007 Red Herring 100 Asia list), so that’s a bit of an excuse, but…Incesoft? Is that the very best name they could come up with? Did they consider alternatives that evoked no primal human taboos in English and just find them too humdrum?

Even leaving aside the association with inappropriate intrafamilial contact, this is a terrible name. How are you supposed to pronounce it? If the first part is supposed to rhyme with the word wince, then the two syllables of this name are separated by an impossibly long hissing sound. It hardly helps to insert a little schwa sound for the e. But maybe there’s another pronunciation that makes more sense.

If there are Mandarin speakers reading this, please help The Name Inspector understand how this monstrosity might have come into existence. Is the Ince- part based on a transliteration of something nice? A family name perhaps?

Some naming companies offer a service that allows you to screen names in different languages. (The Name Inspector helped to develop just such a service at one of the companies where he worked). Incesoft perfectly demonstrates the need for this service. This name should have been vetted in English before being unleashed on the world. It’s for a global technology company, after all.

All this shows the downside of marketing on the web. It’s never been easier to create a global brand, and it’s never been easier to saddle yourself with a horrible name.

Tags: incesoft, the name incesoft, robots, web robots

The Seattle-based mobile platform company ZenZui recently changed its name to Zumobi, in preparation for a beta release in December. The name ZenZui was based on the word zen plus the acronym zui, which stands for ‘Zooming User Interface’. That’s the technology, developed at Microsoft Research, that Zumobi claims will take the pain out of surfing the web on your mobile phone.

While mingling at a Seattle tech event, The Name Inspector met a fellow from the company who gave a little demo, and it was pretty cool. The Zumobi interface divides the screen of your phone into four quadrants, and each of those contains four quadrants, so there are sixteen little boxes altogether. Each box contains a rectangular icon, called a tile, that represents a website, a feed, or some other little piece of web content. As you might guess from the term Zooming User Interface, you use Zumobi by zooming in and out on the quadrants and selecting tiles. If you know what you’re doing, like this guy did, you can do it really fast–zooming in the speedy sense.

The name ZenZui probably made the zen connection to evoke the sense of calm mastery that the interface provides. The -Zui ending came from the generic descriptive term for the interface, but made the whole name seem like an exotic foreign word. Maybe a little too exotic. In a BlogTalkRadio interview at Mobile Internet World, Senior Marketing Manager Beth Goza said that “zui, meaning ‘Zooming User Interface’, hasn’t really taken off for the average joe”. She also said that “zen is a pretty crowded space”. So the name change was spurred by a need for both clarity and distinctiveness.

Cindy Spodek Dickey, VP of Marketing for Zumobi, says that the idea for the name change came from several sources, including partners and end users. “Everyone agreed that ZenZui was a ‘cool’ name,” she wrote in an email, “but that a name with zen was an ambiguous product space (restaurants, spas, liquor, electronics to name a few) and didn’t fully communicate what our unique product was truly about…our zooming user interface and mobility focus. (Zoom + mobile = Zumobi)”. The new name was the result of brainstorming among management and employees.

Since the introduction of the .mobi internet domain, mobi has perhaps become generally recognized as a shortened form of mobile, so Zumobi might be thought of as essentially two words stuck together, with a spelling tweak. It’s a blend rather than a compound, because it’s pronounced with the stress pattern of a single word, and the m serves a double function as the last sound of zoom and the first sound of mobi.

The Name Inspector believes that Zumobi is a definite improvement over ZenZui, though without the double Zs it’s not as visually distinctive. Zumobi does indeed evoke the product’s special qualities more effectively. It’s more descriptive than suggestive, but that’s OK for a new, unusual product that’s so clearly characterized by a single salient feature. Zumobi is easy and fun to say. And it has that most important and elusive of qualities–the domain was available.

Tags: zumobi, the name zumobi, zenzui, the name zenzui, zooming user interface, zui, zooming, mobile, mobile platform, mobile phone

Clearly The Name Inspector has not been participating in NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month). He’s been working on a secret project. But now he plans to up the posting rate a bit.

Radar Networks recently introduced their first Semantic Web application: Twine. In a presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit, Radar Networks founder and CEO Nova Spivack said that Twine wants to organize your personal information the way Google wants to organize the world’s information.

If you’re a little fuzzy on what, exactly, the Semantic Web is, you’re not alone. The term has a narrow technical definition but is sometimes used more broadly for various cutting-edge ways to represent and manipulate knowledge on the web. In the narrow sense, the Semantic Web is a set of markup standards for representing the content, as opposed to the format, of data. These include XML (Extensible Markup Language), RDF (Resource Description Framework), and OWL (Web Ontology Language). The gist of all these things is to make markup do more of the work that we associate with databases–representing objects and the relations between them–rather then being focused on presentation the way HTML is.

Twine in still in closed beta, so it’s hard to know exactly what it does. According to the website, “Twine is a new service that intelligently helps you share, organize and find information with people you trust.” It uses natural language understanding, the Semantic Web, and machine learning. The natural language understanding seems to be focused on named entity recognition–analyzing text to identify names of people, places, organizations, and things like that. Semantic Web technologies provide metadata standards that allow data objects and relations to be extracted from emails and other documents. Machine learning, according to Spivack’s presentation, allows Twine to make inferences based on information in Wikipedia.

This is all rather heady and abstract stuff. To provide a vivid and down-to-earth metaphor for this new kind of “Web 3.0” application, Radar Networks has named its product after a very mundane thing. The name Twine is the handiwork of San Francisco-based naming company Igor.

It’s interesting to compare the name Twine to the name Apple, which The Name Inspector wrote about some time ago. Both names make technical, abstract things more accessible by associating them with everyday objects. But the name Apple gets a certain glamour from the beauty and the cultural and literary significance of apples. Twine, on the other hand, is decidedly unglamorous. Apples are things you polish and proudly display in a bowl, but twine is something you throw in a drawer or a car trunk and forget about, until you need to use it.

This, of course, is part of the point of the name Twine. Apple’s products are high-design fetish objects that command people’s attention and adoration. It makes sense to represent them with an aesthetically and sensuously appealing object. Semantic Web technologies are invisible and derive all their value from their utility. The name Twine helps to make the technologies more visible through metaphor, but still focuses entirely on their utility.

The twine image manages to evoke the idea of connectedness in a fresh way. Words like web, net, and link have been done to death. Twine is something you actually manipulate with your hands and use to do something, so there are good associations with sensory memory and purposeful action.

On the sound front, Twine is great. It’s a nice, pronounceable single syllable, and vaguely evokes other connection-related words like between and twin.

Twine succeeds in making an esoteric technology meaningful to non-techies. Good Igor!

Tags: twine, the name twine, semantic web, web 3.0, radar networks, nova spivack, web 2.0 summit