Tags: signs, herfy’s, burgers, restaurant, uwajimaya, seattle

Residents of the Seattle area, have you been to Ignite Seattle!? (Please note that The Name Inspector is not loose with his exclamation points–that one is part of the name Ignite Seattle!.) The third one is happening next week–Thursday, April 5–at the Capitol Hill Arts Center. At 6:30 there’s some sort of group building project […]

On Monday The Name Inspector hosted a Biznik workshop and everyone discussed the name of the popular photo-sharing site Flickr. It’s an interesting case study in selecting a real word to serve as a business name.
The word flicker clearly evokes scenarios associated with light and photography. One person said it reminded her of movie projectors […]

The name Skype combines the familiar and the peculiar. Though there’s that unmistakable word sky in there, the end of the name is a bit of a mystery. On the Skype forum, an employee reveals that the name was derived from the expression sky peer-to-peer, which was shortened to Skyper and then to Skype. So […]

The post on 10 company name types was so well received that The Name Inspector has decided, shamelessly, to make a sequel. This time we’ll look at names for lesser-known search engines, in which The Name Inspector has a special interest.
The fodder for this analysis is the list of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines […]

If you found the title of this post a little confusing, then you have some idea what’s wrong with the name Tenacious Offense. This name belongs to young Seattle-based company that seems to be a kind of rent-a-bizdev team for small startups trying to land big clients. Thanks to Brant Williams for writing and sharing […]

Paul Montgomery writes about his company’s name:
Tinfinger is intended to be to the Who’s Who what Wikipedia was to the
Encyclopedia Britannica. Its main function is a search engine of
biographical information on famous and semi-famous public figures. It
also has news aggregation features similar to Techmeme, based around
people’s names instead of hyperlink hierarchies.
The name Tinfinger is a […]

Every once in a while The Name Inspector likes to step back and look at the big picture. This post illustrates ten name categories that account for all the names in the TechCrunch company/product index. Well, almost all of them. The name 1 800 Free 411 would have required its own category, and that […]

When The Name Inspector decided to go into business, the first book he bought was Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start. Why? Well, it did get great reviews on Amazon. But another factor was the poetic title. Not only does it rhyme, but the word art is orthographically and phonetically contained in the word […]

Hillel Cooperman of Jackson Fish Market sent a pointer to his naming story, which appears in the first post of his company blog. Head on over and take a look. But please do come back.
Back? Good.
The name Jackson Fish Market belongs to a small software company. That could be outright confusing, couldn’t it? But […]