Musings from The Software Underground

Naming your product is hard. Naming your company can be even harder, especially when you need a URL to go with it and you need to avoid existing trademarks.

The Name Inspector has the pros and cons of what they deem the 10 company name types are. It's an interesting read.

Though most of the TechCrunch names are “Web 2.0? names, there’s nothing particularly Web 2.0 about the categories. They all represent linguistic naming strategies that can be used for companies or products of any kind.

Of course, there are different ways to categorize names. You can use phonetic properties like sonority or number of syllables. You can use semantic criteria, such as whether they are metaphorical, metonymic, or literally descriptive.

MacGourmet and SQLGrinder more or less fall into the "Compounds" category. MacGourmet is a combination of the platform name and its target audience. SQLGrinder is a compound of the language that is basis of a lot of database development, SQL, and an action play on the fact that is uses JDBC, which is part of Java, as it's connection library. (Java, coffee, coffee grinder... get it?). Advenio is much more straight forward. It's in category one, a real foreign word, a latin word meaning "to reach, or to arrive." I found it while scouring a latin dictionary for a word that didn't seem to be used by any companies, hadn't had its dot com domain already registered and sounded cool. In what category does your company or product name fall?

Full post: 10 company name types on TechCrunch: Pros and cons