At first glance, Kindle Fire seems like a pretty good name. It uses a thematically coherent naming strategy, similar to the one that Apple used when it named the Macintosh, presumably inspired by the apple variety McIntosh. What’s more, the word fire, like the word apple, is simple and familiar, and has lots of metaphorical [...]

Naming isn’t all soft, fuzzy language stuff. Mind you, The Name Inspector loves the soft, fuzzy language stuff. It’s his job to love it. But he realizes that businesspeople often have more practical considerations on their minds, as they should. So here are some hard practical truths about naming that The Name Inspector often shares with [...]

Photo from Flickr by Stuart Seeger. Used under a Creative Commons 2.0 license. Remember a while back when The Name Inspector did a post about Seattle startup names, and promised a series of posts about names in other entrepreneurial hotspots? This is the next in that series: a little post about Austin startup names. To [...]

The Name Inspector’s getting local. He’s decided to take a look at all 409 names in Seattle 2.0′s Seattle Startup Index. In his grand vision, this is the first in a series of posts about company names in different local startup scenes. Do entrepreneurs in Seattle do it differently from the ones in Boston or [...]

Watch out! There’s a new electric motorcycle in town. It’s the Enertia, from Brammo. Yes, like the word inertia, but with an E, which The Name Inspector supposes stands for electric. So, electric + inertia. Inertia. Kind of an unusual word choice for a motorcycle, don’t you think? Inertia, as we all remember from physics [...]

The Name Inspector has recently learned about Lard Butt, a new athletic apparel company based here in Seattle. This is a great example of naming done right. First, there are the positive associations of lard, a filling and economical ingredient that makes fried foods taste great. The word lard also calls to mind larder, which [...]

While perusing the New York Times magazine last weekend, The Name Inspector saw a big ad for a new organic vodka called Crop. It’s clear what they were going for with this name. It connects the product to its agricultural origins. It makes the vodka seem like something natural and fresh and wholesome–like food! Let’s [...]

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 [...]

Of the name Utterz, with special reference in the final paragraph to movies of the late 1990s. Sometimes The Name Inspector must respond swiftly to the cries of an innocent web surfer in distress. The listenerd has issued a plea for help with the name Utterz, for a mobile blogging platform. With Utterz you can [...]

Last week John Cook at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer asked: What is it with the word ‘dango’ and internet companies?. Of course, there’s the online movie site Fandango. And then there’s Portland’s Jobdango and Seattle’s Zoodango. Now, a former Microsoft project manager is rolling out a new site called GodDango, which he hopes will become a [...]