The art of startup names |
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Mass High Tech
The art of startup names
Wordsmiths and linguists could spend countless hours debating the origins of quirky names of Internet companies. After all, this is an industry which has transformed words like Yahoo and Amazon and introduced monikers like Cheezburger and Zillow. But have you ever really wondered how startups come up with their names?
Chris Johnson -- also known as The Name Inspector -- digs into that issue in his latest post in which he analyzes more than 400 names from Seattle 2.0's Startup Index. What does Johnson find? Interestingly, he notes that Seattle startups tend to prefer phrase names -- monikers like BuddyTV, ActiveRain and BigOven that combine two words together.
Johnson notes that Seattle startups are "phrazy," pointing out that about 34 percent of the startups on the Seattle index could be classified as having phrase names. That compares to about 25 percent of the names on a comparable index from TechCrunch, Johnson says.
More interesting is that Seattle startups appear to have an aversion to using real word names, with only 12 percent of those on the index falling into that category. (Seattle startup examples include Gist, Delve, Faves, PayScale and Patents.com, while he also tosses names with creative spellings in this category like Cozi, Evri, Kashless, Glympse and Mpire). Johnson has a theory about why real world names might be missing in Seattle, surmising that because the Startup Index lends itself to bootstrapped companies they don't have the capital to spend on domain name acquisitions. After all, he says most of the real word domain names are already taken.
"The need for economy forces us to be ingenious with all our resources, including our verbal ones," writes Johnson.
And why so many phrase names in Seattle?
Johnson says phrases are "especially flexible" and that there's been a bit of a backlash against compound names recently.
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