[tags]area 51, area51, furniture, home furnishings, capitol hill, seattle[/tags]

Phil Butler over at ReadWriteWeb has written a post about a new online music service called Fairtilizer. Oh dear. The Name Inspector doesn’t even know where to begin. This name is presumably a pun: the first syllable of the word fertilizer has been changed to the similar-sounding word fair. Or maybe the word air has [...]

As many of you know, The Name Inspector includes special phonetic representations along with his name analyses. He’s always considered these to be not only graphically interesting, but also useful as visualization tools. Even if you aren’t familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet, on which these representation are based, you can still get an overall [...]

A couple months back The Name Inspector had lunch with Brian Dorsey. Brian talked about a kooky idea he had for a website: people would specify a date and a geographical area and get matched up with random strangers via email to meet for lunch. Brian really likes to go out for lunch. He works [...]

The Name Inspector is pleased and flattered to have been mentioned by lexicographer Grant Barrett on his radio show “A Way with Words“, produced by NPR affiliate station KPBS in San Diego. Here’s a link to the podcast. Grant mentions The Name Inspector just a couple minutes in when he talks about two of his [...]

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 [...]

The Name Inspector would like to remind everyone in the Seattle area about BizJam, which is happening all day this coming Saturday. If you’ve been on the fence about whether to go, take note: The Name Inspector is prepared to offer one of his readers a half-price discount on admission. The first person to send [...]

[tags]victrola, coffee, cafe, coffeehouse, sign, signs, capitol-hill, capitolhill, seattle[/tags]

Microsoft recently unveiled Surface, a tabletop computer with an amazing multi-touch interface. There’s no keyboard or mouse-you interact with Surface through its display, which is touch-sensitive and can respond to simultaneous touches from multiple fingers or people. That means you can “grab” objects and move them around, re-size photos by stretching them out with your [...]