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 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 means [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

TrenchMice is was a site where people can share inside scoops about the companies where they work. Trenchmouse John has written a great post about how they came up with the name TrenchMice. This is one of the best, most thorough naming stories that The Name Inspector has come across.
John wrote the post in response [...]

Last month Rogelio Bernal Andreo shared this naming story with The Name Inspector:
The story of coRank is a bit unusual. Back early last year I was thinking of launching a couple of services and wasn’t sure what name to pick (you know how “easy” is to grab a decent .com these days), so I ended [...]

Several months ago Mike Buckbee told The Name Inspector about his startup named Fabjectory. It will take a 3D digital representation of your Nintendo Mii or SecondLife avatar, or a 3D model you create yourself with SketchUp, and turn it into an actual physical object.
Making the virtual real seems to be a new trend. Have [...]

Richard MacManus at Read/WriteWeb has posted a great list of the 10 worst web app names. The comment section, just as great, shows that those ten have a lot of competition.
Tags: readwriteweb, rrw

In the 10 company name types post, The Name Inspector identified ten ways to put together a name out of meaningful parts. That post was about the nuts and bolts of a name’s structure. This is the first post is a series that will focus on an issue that’s more slippery but also more fundamental: [...]