Duncan Riley has posted on TechCrunch about Incuby, a social network where inventors can promote their inventions. The Name Inspector thinks this is a great idea for a web business.
But not a great name for one. Clearly it’s intended to be a fun tweak of incubator, which is what we call organizations that help delicate […]

Most company names consist of just one or two meaningful parts. That makes sense, because brevity is important in a name for several reasons: memorability, simplicity of pronunciation, ease of writing and typing, and graphic compactness in a logo.
So crowded is the space of names, however, that people have been forced into three-meaningful-part territory. The […]

Shelly Farnham and Peter Brown are the co-founders of Waggle Labs, a Seattle software and consulting company that specializes in social technology. Their new product, Pathable, lets participants in social events tag themselves with their interests and personal connections to find other similar participants. Shelly and Peter were kind enough to share a story […]

A while ago Allegra Searle-LeBel sent in a story about naming her online media-editing startup:
We had been struggling for about 2 months, trying to find the right name. There was this funny, almost mystical sense that it existed *somewhere*. We just needed to keep slogging through the troughs of lame options and almost […]

If you’ve bought an artsy-crafty item on the web lately, or if you read Fred Wilson’s blog A VC, then you’ve probably run into Etsy. Since launching in June 2005, this Brooklyn-based company has managed to build an extremely enthusiastic fan base and become the eBay of handmade goods.
Etsy is all about community. There’s a […]

Hosting that Biznik workshop on naming has inspired The Name Inspector to post some tips about the actual naming process.
First, to get an idea of how much money and time big corporations spend on name development, check out Valleywag’s post about how AOL named its new search service (thanks to Brady Forrest for sending this […]

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 […]