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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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[/tags]

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: [...]

The Name Inspector has sort of been on vacation this week, but came across a name whose existence cannot go unremarked. It’s Thoof, for a user-submitted news personalization site. This is a name that defies criticism. It’s so intentionally meaningless and phonetically counterintuitive that it renders irrelevant any earnest discussion of its strengths and weaknesses. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]