Before the financial unpleasantness of recent years, and the attendant collapse in the housing market, developers were throwing up cheap condos all over Seattle trying to accommodate /capitalize on the growing population. Now you see these condos everywhere, and most are hurting for tenants. One building that has caught The Name Inspector’s eye is right [...]

Come meet this cute, colorful little owl at the very first Seattle Interactive Conference next month! Actually, The Name Inspector isn’t sure the owl will be there. But the conference is sure to be colorful anyway. Seattle Interactive is about the sweet spot where “technology, creativity, and emergent trends” intersect. That means entrepreneurs will be [...]

The Seattle Startup Index is Seattle 2.0′s regular ranking of Seattle startups based on web traffic. The newest ranking is out, and The Name Inspector is delighted to see Zulily, a former client, at #4, just behind Cheezburger Network, BuddyTV, and Feedjit. Zulily has been burning up the track lately–just last month John Cook wrote at [...]

Brevity is a virtue in a name, usually. Come up with a short name that relates to your company or product in an imaginative way, and you’re golden. A sort of verbal minimalism is the goal of most naming efforts. Some names, however, succeed with a more…maximalist approach. Two extreme examples are the well-known full-sentence [...]

On a recent flight to San Francisco, The Name Inspector was seated, by coincidence, right across the aisle from an acquaintance. On the return flight, he was moved from an aisle to a middle seat to accommodate a family, and found himself right next to the same guy. Weird. Anyway, the two had ample time [...]

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 [...]

(The Name Inspector used to do this as a semi-regular feature, and then stopped. He’s going to try reviving it for a while, but this time, with words!) While strolling down 1st Ave in Seattle, The Name Inspector was struck by the name of this cafe. Inside there were displays of what looked like traditional [...]

A fun way to spend a rainy hour in Seattle is to browse in Uwajimaya, a huge Asian supermarket in the International District (which locals call “the ID”). There you can see products that, from a mainland American point of view (at least this mainland American point of view), are pretty exotic. Things like durian-flavored [...]

The experiment continues. The Name Inspector is once again having “office hours” consultations at greatly reduced prices. In-person meetings are best (for you Seattle folks), but phone/chat works too. Contact him today or tomorrow for details.

A few days ago John Cook reported that lawyers from job site Jobdango want the folks at Zoodango, a site that has nothing to do with jobs, to stop using the name Zoodango because the -dango ending infringes on Jobdango’s trademark. Zoodango CEO James Sun said they’d fight the trademark issue even though they’re changing [...]