Why are startup names getting weirder and weirder?

In this case, the only feasible solution is to invent new words so that you don't have to pay up to $2 million for a concise and functional URL. Here’s the full text of the article: A pair of cousins ??in New York City have launched a digital sing-along recording storybook company, which they’ve named “Mibblio,” which is a combination of “music” and “biblio.” (bibliographical catalogue). In Australia, there is a startup that connects large companies with big data scientists. The founders of this company chose the name "Kaggle". "Shodogg" is a mobile screen sharing platform founded by a former toy industry executive. It has been established for two years. A Mississippi man created a website that connects consumers with local businesses and service providers, and he named the company Zaarly. In Silicon Valley, weird startup names first surfaced about 20 years ago. In Silicon Valley at that time, companies such as Yahoo and Google began to emerge. The former’s company name represented “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle” (another hierarchical unofficial prophecy), and the latter The company name is adapted from the English word "Googol" (10 to the 100th power) according to the usual English spelling. By the early 2000s, the trend had spread to startups outside Silicon Valley, such as Vancouver, Canada-based photo sharing site Flickr and New York-based light blogging platform Tumblr. And today, the latest wave of startup names are getting even weirder. The reasoning, these companies say, is that every new company—whether it's a popsicle maker or a furniture retailer—needs its own website. With approximately 252 million domain names registered on the entire Internet, relatively short, easily identifiable URLs have long been occupied. Some entrepreneurs say that the only viable solution is to invent new words, such as Mibblio, Kaggle, Shodogg, and Zaarly, so that you don't have to pay up to $2 million for a concise and useful URL. For example, the website Investing.com sold for about $2.5 million last year. When naming, many startups will start from startups that have already achieved success? For example, Stockholm-based music sharing platform Spotify, New York domain name abbreviation service Bit.ly, Los Angeles cloud content management service provider Box or Is it Square, the San Francisco credit card reader maker? There are lessons to be learned there. Here are some informal startup naming trends compiled by brand consultants Christopher Johnson and Nancy Friedman: Using “ify” or “efy” as a suffix: 102 startups Companies; Using “ly,” “li,” or “lee” as suffix: 161 startups; “Box” in company name: 28 startups; “Square” in company name: 10 startups . Steve Manning, founder of naming consultancy Igor, points out that company founders tend to favor five- to seven-letter words because they worry that longer words will be difficult for customers to remember. From a linguistic perspective, there are only a few ways to invent new words, including misspelling, compounding, blending, and splicing. Mibblio co-founder David Leiberman, 28, said the company's naming process takes as long as "a human gestation period"; another co-founder, Sammy Rubin, He added: "But only more painful (than pregnancy and childbirth)."

The two men planned a name for the company from scratch many times. Early names they considered included Babethoven, Yipsqueak and Canarytales, but in the end they felt they were not perfect. Both men liked the name "Squeakbox," but Lieberman decided to combine "music" with "biblio" (the Latin root of "book") to spell "Squeakbox." Miblio". "The word looked like 'MY-blee-oh,'" Rubin said, so he suggested adding a "b" to aid the pronunciation. In addition, the two letters "b" also play two corners, turning into the image of an eighth note in the company's logo. As for the company name Kaggle, 30-year-old Australian data scientist Anthony Goldbloom wrote an algorithm that can generate all possible sound combinations of three syllables or less that can be formed by letters. And the domain name addresses of these combinations have not been registered yet. “I wanted to save money so much that I didn’t want to pay for an (existing) domain name,” he said. Among the 700 domain names calculated by this algorithm, he finally found two words: Sumble and Kaggle; then he wrote an email and sent it to family and friends, asking them which one of them they preferred. The result was Most people chose Kaggle, so he chose that name. Kaggle's current backers include a number of Silicon Valley investors, including Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal and chairman of the company. But Goodrum said that since he moved the company from Australia to the United States, he has noticed that residents in the Midwest tend to pronounce "Kaggle" as "KAY-gel," which is the same as "Kegel." "Kegel" refers to the "Kegel muscle strengthening method", which is a method for women to take turns tightening and relaxing the vaginal muscles to facilitate the smooth delivery of the baby during childbirth. In other words, "Kaggle" may not be the best name for this online data startup. "For startups, the main driver of naming now is the misguided mission of finding the shortest, easy-to-pronounce (unregistered) website domain name possible," said Igor founder Manning. He added that startups are likely underestimating their potential customers. He also said that insisting on using shorter URLs places unnecessary restrictions on startups. In the mid-20th century, the heyday of the Yellow Pages, it became popular to name companies with an initial "A." By the turn of the century, 800 phone numbers fueled the trend for companies to name companies with seven-letter words in order to make their names compatible with touch-tone phones. Like today's trends, these trends reflect entrepreneurs' determination to create the best possible virtual real estate. In 2004, Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield started working on a name for their photo sharing website. They originally wanted to call the company Flicker. , but the domain name address Flicker.com has been occupied, and the domain owner does not want to sell it. Therefore, Fick suggested using Flickr as the company name. Nine years later, the site says it has more than 8 billion photos. Startups first started coining new words to name their companies as an adaptive measure to adapt to the lack of short URLs, but they later became the hallmark of a specific aesthetic. When Twitter was founded in 2006, the company called itself "Twitter" because, as co-founder Biz Stone explained, the domain address Twitter.com "had already is occupied, so we guess (purchasing this domain name) will cost a lot of money."

The company's co-founders made arrangements to acquire the domain once the company was up and running, he said. A new wave of company names is driving this trend, with the result being many coined words that look and sound alike. Spotify was founded in 2006. The company has achieved success, with a total of 24 million active users and a valuation of around $3 billion. This success is likely to have prompted the company to use the suffix "ify" to The source of the latest trends in naming companies. According to statistics from brand consultant Johnson, there are now 102 startups using the suffix "ify" to name their companies, including New York notification system Xtify and Kansas City, Missouri information technology service provider Stackify; and in five years Previously, only a few companies used this suffix. Shodogg is a company founded by Herb Mitschele in 2011. The goal of naming it was to create an easy-to-remember brand name for the parent company TouchStream Technologies. The idea of ??the company's founding team was to use the term "show dog" to combine the concept of their own screen sharing application as a "video's best friend" and a media presentation tool. But Michele felt that using the compound word "Showdog" directly was too boring, and that the misspelling "Shodog" would be better; but "Shodog" looked too short and lacked personality. So Michele added a "g" to "Shodog" to convey an attitude about not being too serious about spelling everything correctly.