Okay, squatters are officially just below spammers in the ranks of evil...

[jducoeur]

Having gotten the word from above that changing the company name would be a Good Thing, I've just spent a couple of hours free-associating possible names. I'm trying to stick to real words, rather than the usual dippy made-up ones or misspellings.

What do I find? Dozens and dozens of good possibilities, of which only about half are being used. And the other half are all being squatted. *Sigh*. They really have gone through the entire dictionary, and taken every bloody word. We may yet wind up paying someone blackmail for a good domain, or have to settle for something goofy...

Comments

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Numbers-for-letters "sk8board" and multiple words, too?

You have my sympathy.

[eclecticmagpie.livejournal.com]

Don't pick a name that is composed exclusively of common real words. Makes it hard to find you in a search engine.

[jducoeur]

Hmm. Interesting point -- probably the best argument I've heard for the silly made-up names. Well, I suspect we'll be stuck with one anyway...

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

When I was looking for a name for a new company ~2 years ago, I actually found about a dozen 6-letter dictionary words that weren't registered.* (I registered some of them but didn't use them; when one of them expired it was promptly snapped up by a squatter who then offered to sell it back to me for $BIGNUM. The Internet really does need some policing.)

Whatever you do, be very wary of naming consultants. Some friends of mine were among the founders of a company known initially as "Arepa", which owned and used arepa.com. The "professional" management decided being named for a South American foodstuff was bad, and hired naming consultants. The naming consultants, for on the order of $50k, came up with "Into Networks". Note that "into.net" was taken and not for sale. But they considered this no barrier, and registered "intonetworks.com" — at which point the company's employees started calling it "intone tworks" and bringing their resumes up to date. It was dead within a year.

* Note: I didn't search the entire six-letter-dictionary-word space. What I did do was fairly sophisticated; enough so that I feel like it's too valuable to give away, I'm sorry to say.

[jducoeur]

Oh, I'm well aware of the horror of naming consultants. I remember when Intermetrics spent months talking to naming consultants, only to come up with the monumentally silly name "AverStar"...