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Web 2.0 names are hard!

April 17th, 2007 (Visited 6390 times) Tags:

Here I am walking around the show floor at Web 2.0 Expo, and I guess every possible combination of e, i, you, me, my, ster, and so on must have been taken. I have no idea what these companies all do, but check out these names: Yugma, Yoono, Zoho, Denodo, Venyo, Nexo, Astreya, Dekoh, Egnyte.

I guess ending in o is the new ending-in-r-without-preceding-vowel.

BTW, I give a lecture here tomorrow, all by my lonesome since Ben Cerveny got sick, plus I am on a panel. So I have to go finish my slides now.

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15 Responses to “Web 2.0 names are hard!”

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Techscape » Blog Archive » Web 2.0 news: Nokia and Web 2.0, Thailand bans Mashable, Facebook developments, Web 2.0 names are hard wrote on April 18th, 2007 at 9:00 am:

[...] Koster says that Web 2.0 names are hard: Here I am walking around the show floor at Web 2.0 Expo, and I guess every possible combination of [...]

Web 2.0 Expo: Launch Pad I « Ramblings of a Short Man wrote on April 19th, 2007 at 6:47 am:

[...] Re: the e: http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/04/17/web-20-names-are-hard/ [...]

Denodo Technologies wrote on July 4th, 2007 at 8:58 am:

[...] 06-11-2007 Web 2.0 Names are Hard, Raph Kosters. [...]

Reader Comments

Tess said on April 17th, 2007 at 6:22 pm:
I see an Agilent sign frequently in my daily travels, and it still cracks me up. It’s one of those names that just screams “We paid an exorbitant amount of money for a naming company to come up with this in 1999, and now we’re stuck with it.”
L said on April 17th, 2007 at 6:56 pm:
It’s just because everybody wants an available .com domain and those have been running thin for years.
Others prefer to settle for a .net domain or a .biz domain…
Karel Lukas said on April 17th, 2007 at 8:40 pm:
Hi Raph,

Thanks for noticing us (Yugma) at Web 2.0. The nice thing about the name Yugma is that it is a Sanskrit word that literally means “confluence” and “coming together”… which is really appropriate for what we are all about… that is, free web conferencing and web collaboration for interactive real-time sharing of information and ideas. Please stop by our booth (#322) on Wednesday if you are available. I’d love to give you a quick demo of our fast and free Yugma service, and the cool new widget feature for embedding Yugma into any application or website/blog.

Thanks,
Karel
http://www.yugma.com
Morgan Ramsay said on April 17th, 2007 at 9:47 pm:
“We paid an exorbitant amount of money for a naming company to come up with this in 1999, and now we’re stuck with it.”

Blame Landor. Igor hates ‘em. I’m not a fan jacks-of-all-trades masters-of-none either.
JuJutsu said on April 18th, 2007 at 2:58 am:
Interesting. Areao was taken as a name eh?
Gina said on April 18th, 2007 at 5:37 am:
Thanks for noticing us as well. Nexo is a real word in Spanish. The English equivalent is nexus meaning connection or a connected group. Since Nexo is all about collaboration and online groups, it makes sense. Check us out at Web 2.0 Expo in booth #18.
Raph said on April 18th, 2007 at 8:05 am:

Well, I can’t throw stones for using another language — I did for my company too.
Morgan Ramsay said on April 18th, 2007 at 10:53 am:
Yeah, but Raph, you used a dead language. Only joking.
Thomas David Baker said on April 18th, 2007 at 12:23 pm:
The emphasis is on “pronounceable” and “acquiring the domain name will not cost us most of the money we have to last the first year”.

The strange thing is of course that most of the good companies come about this way and having a “good” domain name is slowly but surely becoming somewhat fishy. I wonder if Fog Creek are still glad they paid all that money for copilot.com instead of just calling it ipsindodo.com or something similar.

I liked my approach of stringing two words everyone knows together to get a spellable, prononceable name. But shorter nonsense words seem to be more popular (mebo, flickr, odeo, etc. etc.)
Lou said on April 18th, 2007 at 3:28 pm:
Are you going to post your web 2.0 slides somewhere?
Allen Sligar said on April 19th, 2007 at 1:23 pm:
@Thomas

“The strange thing is of course that most of the good companies come about this way..”

You quite obviously have not been to many SF web 2.0 networking parties the conversation goes somthing like this:

hip SF web20h guy: “so what does GameMarketMetrics do?”
Me (uncool web1oH guy): “we measure video game consumer data”
hip guy: “oh, that names really um…”old school” you need something cooler”
Me: “Ok well so what your company um…what is that Yoobeuo (made this up)do?
hip guy: “We arrgregate wisdom of crowds a using customizable distributable platforms to help people make decisions and liveblog to thier social neural network”
Me: “so you make widgets people can customize?”
hip guy: “well yeah kinda..but its cooler than that..”

I wont even get into how the monetization and business plans conversations go, the problem is most of these kids are looking for 2 things: easy VC cash, and a quick flip of the company. Most of them are not concerned or could care less about building something of value, a product, or a long term solution, or for that matter a relavent company.

I stopped going to web 2.0 events about 3 months ago. Prolonged exposure to irrational exhuberence starts to make you question peoples sanity.
Dekohworld said on April 22nd, 2007 at 9:02 pm:
Pronouncing Dekoh is simple…”deck-oH”

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