As a touch point for this post, The Name Inspector will look back on his old “10 company name types on TechCrunch” post, the most-visited page on this blog. That post broke down the names in the TechCrunch index at that time, which was much smaller than it is now, into a number of different categories. We can use those categories to help make sense of what’s going on here now, naming-wise.

Are there any surprises? Yes! Seattle is crazy about phrase names! Phrazy! Phrase names were only the third most numerous type in the TechCrunch post (making up about 25% of the names), but they’re numero uno here (about 34%). To be scientific, we have to acknowledge there are many possible explanations for this. Maybe the Seattle Startup Index includes a different range of types of companies than those found in TechCrunch in 2007. Maybe there’s been a nationwide change. Maybe it’s somehow related to all the coffee here. Maybe…

But that’s all speculation. Let’s get down to it.

First, what exactly counts as a phrase name? Put two words together and you’ve got a phrase, right? It’s actually a bit more complicated than that. Sometimes 1 + 1 = 1 where words are concerned. Certain word combinations are pronounced as a single word, and we call these compounds. Think of the different emphasis in the expressions The president lives in the White House and Pat lives in a white house. White House is a compound, and is emphasized on the first word, while white house in the second sentence is a phrase, and is emphasized on the word house, which is the “head” or main word of the phrase. Compounds are typically made by putting two nouns together, but other types of words can be used as well.

The Name Inspector counted names as phrases when they (1) followed the normal rules for putting together non-compound phrases (such as adjective + noun), or (2) broke those rules and had compound pronunciation. Things got tricky because some names that are syntactically phrases get pronounced as compounds. They’re kind of all run together. An example is Postacrime.com. “Post a crime” is actually a whole imperative sentence, and would normally be pronounced with emphasis on the word crime. But The Name Inspector assumes the name Postacrime is emphasized on the first syllable. Names like these went into the phrase category for syntactic reasons, but they might have been counted as compounds. (They were also counted as phrases in the TechCrunch post.)

Topping off the Seattle Startup index is Cheezburger Network, which is responsible for another website with a whole-sentence name, I Can Has Cheezburger. Then there’s Survey Analytics, BuddyTV, Robot Co-Op, ActiveRain, BigOven, the syntactically unusual HasOffers, and many others.

Seattle doesn’t favor phrase names at the expense of compounds, though. The old TechCrunch index was about 23% compounds, while the Seattle Startup Index is about 25%.There’s Wetpaint, Redfin, Smilebox, FlowPlay, Popshops, Walk Score, and many others. Seattle also makes a pretty good showing with blends, or names that seem like blends, which make up about 8% of the Seattle startup names versus 9% of the TechCrunch names: Zillow (zillions + pillow, though that analysis of the name might have been created after the name was), Feedjit (feed + widget, with a spelling twist), Sporcle (supposedly based on the word oracle–it’s got to be a blend with sparkle, right?), Mercent (merchant + percent?), and some others.

So what type of name does the Seattle Startup Index have fewer of? Real word names. Here’s what’s going on: TechCrunch covers mostly funded startups, which can afford to buy real-word domain names. About 25% of the names in the old TechCrunch index were real words, some with creative spelling. Real-word names make up only 12% of the names in the Seattle Startup Index. The Name Inspector doesn’t know how many companies in the Seattle index are bootstrapped, but he’s willing to guess it’s a lot. So our scrappy little bootstrapped startup scene has a different linguistic landscape than the one on TechCrunch. The need for economy forces us to be ingenious with all our resources, including our verbal ones. Go Seattle!

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 a supply of food or a place where food is stored. Having beans in the larder is almost better than having money in the bank, so everyone should respond positively to this association.

Then there are the many pleasant ideas and feelings evoked by the word butt. You can be the butt of a joke, which lends a mirthful quality to this name. There’s also the cigarette butt, a tangible symbol of a smoker’s satisfied craving. And of course butt means ass, bottom, rump, derriere–a crucial body part we all use and admire every day. To paraphrase Sir Mix-a-Lot, we all like butts–we cannot lie.

The words lard and butt together evoke a sense of homeyness, stability, security–even meditative stillness.

So kudos to Mark, Brent, Eric, David, and Dave. Let’s hope Lard Butt goes far. Or at least, as far as it feels like going.

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

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 dial a special number and speak a blog post into your mobile phone. It will appear as an audio file in a Twitter-like stream on the Utterz network, and special widgets can make it appear in other places too.

Utterz is one of those names that makes you think, “Haha, don’t they know what that sounds like?”. But when you check the website you find they know exactly what it sounds like. In fact, they play the cow connection to the hilt: “Be Herd!” is their tagline, and their phone number is 712-432-Mooo. Their mascot is a cute cow with very prominent teats talking on a cell phone.

So the name is an intentional pun that exploits the homophony of the words utter and udder, with a cheesy little z-for-s twist on the spelling. The word utter, basically a synonym of speak, makes a very literal and direct connection to audio blogging.

You have to have some respect for a name that knows it’s ridiculous and flies its freak flag high. And yet…

There’s something about the whole teat/cell phone/web connection that’s a little unsettling. A little Matrix-y. Everyone knows web use can be obsessive. Addictive even. This name plays right into that idea: our cell phones are our own personal connections to the great life-giving, milk-giving webcow in the sky. It’s enough to give a person, as Cher Horowitz from “Clueless” might say, “an overwhelming sense of ickiness”.

UPDATE, September 20, 2008. The listenerd has reported that Utterz has changed its name to Utterli. And the cow theme is gone from the site. The Name Inspector now sleeps more soundly.

Tags: utterz, utterli, the name utterz, the name utterli, utter, udder, cow, webcow, mobile blogging, name change

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 to a comment he had received about why TrenchMice gets so much less traffic than Guy Kawasaki’s site Truemors. The commenter suggested that it might have to do with the branding: people don’t want to be associated with mice, because timid rodents do not represent professional aspiration well.

Now, The Name Inspector can see the commenter’s point, but has a hard time believing that the name TrenchMice is being unfavorably compared to Truemors–he’s already been in contact with Guy about how Truemors sounds way too much like tumors. Don’t you think Truemors might get a lot of traffic because Guy Kawasaki has one of the most popular blogs on the planet?

But on to John’s post. You should definitely read the whole thing, but here’s a passage about the list of names they first came up with that really struck a chord with The Name Inspector:

What’s interesting is how unsuitable all of these names were, even though we were trying very hard to come up with a deliberately on-target name. It’s as though the actions of trying to be on-target kept us locked in uncreative names. All of these name categories had names we didn’t like, but the “on target” names were uniformly uninteresting.

This is such an important point. Before John even brought it up, The Name Inspector had been working on an analogy to illustrate it. Here it is:

Naming a company is like taking a picture of a house. Being too descriptively “on-target” is like standing right next to the house, or even inside it. To get a good shot, you really need to step away, walk around, and find just the right angle. Ideally, you’ll get interesting details in the background and/or foreground that show something about the neighborhood.

All this does not mean that your name should have nothing to do with your company. Forget that “empty vessel” stuff–most good names are not empty vessels, they’re just indirect. TrenchMice works because it offers a vivid image that’s useful for thinking about anonymous sources of inside information about a competitive world. The Name Inspector doesn’t believe that people using the site would have so much invested in the metaphor that they’d feel like mice themselves. The name TrenchMice is funny, extremely apt, and very memorable. Maybe the World War I allusion is a touch grim, but that’s part of the point of the name. It’s tough out there in the trenches.

Thanks for your very illuminating post, John.

UPDATE 5/29/2010: TrenchMice, alas, ceased to be some time ago. The blog post link above takes you to an archived version of the post. Thanks to John Humphrey for providing the link in his comment below.

Tags: trenchmice, the name trenchmice, truemors, rumors, scoops, companies, company info, company scoops

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 up grabbing coRank.com and coTrack.com.

Then I got busy and those services (that were RSS feed related) never materialized.

Then I came with the idea of what coRank is today: a web-based service that would alow anyone to create their own social news network, or, in simple terms, their own Digg-like service (I try to stay away from using the clone term, as I think we have a different goal than just enabling people to create Digg clones, although it’s the easiest way people understand what coRank is about).

So then we started to look for a good .com name for the service. And we searched, and searched, and visited sedo.com 10 times a day, etc. And we were like that for 2-3 weeks until it struck me: “Wait a sec, I already have coRank.com, I have no use for it, and the name seems to me to be perfect for a service like this one!” coRank - cooperative ranking, people ranking things in a cooperative fashion, etc… It made sense and so we went for it.

And that’s the unusual part of it. I’m sure this is not the first site for which the name had been registered even before the idea came up and when the idea came, we weren’t trying to give a service to a name, but there probably aren’t many cases where this happened, and the name and idea actually married so well

This is a pretty funny coincidence. The name coRank is almost too descriptive, as if Rogelio had not traveled far enough in the naming process. But in fact he traveled a great distance, and ended up with a name that he created before his web app had even been conceived. Is it possible, Rogelio, that you got the idea for your app from the name?

Probably not.

While The Name Inspector often discourages people from using names that are too literally descriptive, in some cases they’re appropriate. This is one of those cases. Descriptive names often work when what you’re naming (a company, a product, a service) doesn’t fall into any recognized category and people need help understanding what you’re up to. That’s almost what’s going on here. Well, actually this case is a bit more complicated than that. coRank is in danger of falling into the category “Digg clone”–that is, of being defined in terms of one particular more prominent web app. If it had a suggestive name like Digg, it might have more trouble escaping the clone label. The name coRank stands out for being more descriptive of a Digg-like service than even the name Digg is. So it works pretty well even though it’s not the most colorful and interesting name in the world. It’s easy to pronounce and understand, and it gets poetic symmetry from the initial and final [k] sounds.

Thanks for your story, Rogelio. Congratulations on finding a use for that name you had sitting around, and good luck with the business.

Tags: corank, the name corank, digg, social network, social news

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 you heard about the promotional stunt for the upcoming Simpsons movie? Twelve 7-Eleven stores in the U.S. have been transformed into Kwik-E-Marts, and carry real versions of the products sold by the fictitious convenience store in the animated series. You can buy a six-pack of Buzz Cola, a box of Frosted KrustyO’s cereal, or a Radioactive Man comic book.

But back to Fabjectory. This is one of the more linguistically complicated names that The Name Inspector has come across (it rivals Bare Escentuals, but is more interesting and less groanworthy). It’s not only a blend name–it’s a double blend! As Mike explains on his blog, It’s made out of the words fabject and factory. But of course, you may not have known that fabject was a word. That’s because it was only coined a few years ago by science fiction author and technology observer Bruce Sterling.

Fabject is a blend of fabricated and object, and refers to a new type of thing created by relatively inexpensive “3D printing” or “rapid prototyping” machines. These things can take a 3D digital model and squirt together thin layers of plastic goop or powder that hardens to make solid objects.

While commercial fabbers, as they’re called, still cost tens of thousands, they’re bound to come down in price, and there’s a community of fab fans who use and promote inexpensive fabbers made from open source kits. Sterling, always a visionary, has given us a new word for something that may become as commonplace as printed documents.

So the whole structure of the name Fabjectory is something like this (the underlined letters show where the pieces overlap):

[ [ Fabricated + object ] + factory ] = Fabjectory

Whew! An additional dimension comes into play when you realize that -jectory evokes the word trajectory, suggesting forceful forward motion and, metaphorically, the future. There’s also the coincidence of fabject starting with the same letter as factory, so that it also seems like the word factory has just been stretched out a bit.

One downside of the name is the fact that, orthographically, it includes the word abject (as in abject poverty), which means something like ‘low, degraded’. Since abject is stressed on the first syllable, though, and the name Fabjectory has its primary emphasis on the -jec- part, this association is pretty weak.

This is not the most elegant name in the world, but it works surprisingly well considering its complexity. Somehow the jointed quality of the name fits the idea of making, fabricating, manufacturing. Given the ever-increasing difficulty of finding available TLD domain names, this kind of multi-layered name might be the future of naming.

Tags: fabjectory, the name fabjectory, fabber, fabbers, fabbing, fab, rapid prototyping, 3D printing, 3D printers, bruce sterling

Tags: readwriteweb, rrw

To examine this issue it helps to have a long list of different names for the same thing. That makes it possible to see the range of meaning strategies used to deliver a message relevant to that thing. This post uses Charles Knight’s list of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines, and considers the different ways the names on the list relate to web search.

The direct approach

Of course, many names are based on words that already have strong conventional connections to the idea of web search and web use:

Searchbots
CrossEngine
FyberSearch
nnseek
Picsearch
Searchles
SearchTheWeb2
Srchr
TheFind
50matches

Some names evoke the more general idea of web surfing, which is getting hard to imagine doing without search technology. The idea of web surfing is of course based on a metaphor that treats web use as travel (discussed below). The word surf, however, is now the most basic verb we have for web use.

SurfWax
Serph

Other names focus less on the activity of web use and more on the informational need that it serves:

Answers
FactBites

Metaphor

Not surprisingly, many of the names on the Alt Search Engines list involve metaphor. That is, they evoke meanings that do not relate to search literally, but that give us a way to think about search using another concept as a sort of model or template.

There are two important things to keep in mind about metaphor. First, it is primarily a conceptual issue, and its linguistic significance follows from that. Second, most of the metaphors that people use in names are not made up, but are already a part of the way we all look at and talk about the world. There are existing metaphors that we can all draw upon and expand upon. A famous and accessible discussion of these ideas can be found in George Lakoff’s book “Metaphors We Live By”.

So what kinds of metaphors are we talking about here? One of the most common casts the search engine as a sentient being.

Search engine as sentient being

Agent 55
GenieKnows
Knuru (play on guru)
Ms. Freckles
Pixsy
Sidekiq
Swamii
Turboscout
guruji (based on the word guru)

This one is a little tricky because personification is common in names independently of any particular metaphor. However, many of the names above emphasize aspects of personhood that are especially relevant to search. Agents, genies, gurus, swamis, and scouts are all people who know or find out things that are useful to us.

Other names relate more generally to the idea of intelligence:

Intelligence

Cognitionsearch
Wisenut
Wize

Another important metaphor treats search and web use as motion. Of course, this metaphor has become a normal part of the way we think and talk about the web: we navigate it, we surf it, we go to or visit websites, etc.

Some names relate to the idea of motion in a general way:

General motion

Bookmach
GameSkoot
GoPubMed
Turboscout
Skreemr (relates to fast motion as well as sound)

Other names tie into the conventional navigation metaphor by evoking different kinds of travel:

Travel

Trexy
Icerocket

A little oddly, some names focus on dancing. These names may be motivated by the motion metaphor combined with the idea that dancing is fun.

Dancing

ChaCha
gogo
iBoogie

The flip side of the motion metaphors is the idea that the web is a world in which we can move.

Web as world

BlogDimension
Kosmix
Sphere
MP3Realm

A completely different metaphor that’s used in the context of web search is the one that treats becoming aware of new things as uncovering objects. A prominent website name that uses this metaphor is Digg (which The Name Inspector has written about).

Becoming aware of things as uncovering objects

BlogDigger
FeedMiner
Fisssh!

The last name on that list combines the uncovering metaphor with the nautical context implicit in the web navigation metaphor.

Related to the uncovering metaphor is the metaphor that treats learning and understanding as physical taking or holding. We use this metaphor when we talk about grasping a difficult subject. Only a one name on the list clearly uses this metaphor, which means that there’s an opportunity for you namers of new search engines!

Grabble

Even this brief examination of search engine names makes it clear that metaphor is an important naming tool that can be used in different ways. When naming anything, it’s important to understand the metaphors we already use to think about that thing.

Tags: metaphor, search, search engines, alt search engines