Fritinancy

Underwear Week: Startups

It’s Day Three of Underwear Week! Time for some news of the new.

TechCrunch, to which I turn for the latest info about gadgets, gizmos, and Google, surprised me a couple of weeks ago with a guest column by research analyst Ross Rubin about, of all things, four new underwear companies. The tech angle? All four startups had sought crowdfunding to build their businesses; two succeeded, two didn’t. My angle? The companies’ names, naturally.

Thinx (pronounced “thinks”) was started by three women in New York City who saw a need for leakproof, stainproof underwear that women can wear confidently during their periods (referred to in the Kickstarter video with inexplicably coy euphemisms like “that time”).

“QUAD-DRY BreatheTECH” provides “a leak and stain resistant support matrix that’s got you covered.”

 

The project met its funding goal, but the name falls short. Yes, it’s non-descriptive (remember, that’s a good thing), but the spelling makes it look like a knockoff—or a spinoff—of the successful Spanx brand, and the “think” concept strikes me as off-target. The customer doesn’t care how much thinking went into your product, and she doesn’t want to have to overthink her purchase. (“Think” is also overused in branding to the point of meaninglessness.) The dull, redundant tagline, “Rethinking Women’s Underwear,” doesn’t convey a benefit or convince me to buy.

The bottom line, so to speak: an interesting product that could better realize its potential with a more effective, less derivative name/tagline combination. Something sassy and unexpected is what’s called for here.

By the way, a tip of the hat to columnist Rubin for working “panty ante” into his copy.

Snowballs (“Cooling underwear for conceiving men”) also addresses a serious problem—male infertility—and it does so with candor (in the pitch) and humor (in the name). “Testicular cooling has been shown to increase sperm count,” the website informs us, “particularly in cases of varicoceles, and we’ve created an comfortable, organic product that will help you succeed naturally before investing thousands of dollars in other risky, more invasive solutions.” I love the product name (and also the Procreativity.net domain name), but backers balked, possibly put off by the product’s high market price ($65 to $80).

Don’t give up, Snowballs! I’d love to see you pitch on “Shark Tank.”

JockGods is a decent name, but slightly misleading if what you’re selling is “high-quality underwear designed for men and women”: both “jock” and “god” suggest that these undies are for guys only. There’s also nothing particularly distinctive about the product. I’m not surprised that the project failed to meet its funding goal.

Helux Gear has a clear, straightforward pitch: there’s a need for “ergonomic” (supportive) men’s briefs with a practical, accessible fly. The name has a nice resonance, suggesting both “luxury for men” and “helix” (suggestive of the unusual design of the pouch). “Helix” also sounds powerful, elemental, and science-y, and the logo makes it stick. Backers apparently agreed: they funded the project with room to spare.

 

Previously on Underwear Week:

Cheekini.

True & Co. and the MILFs.

September Linkfest

New York City gangs take their names very, very seriously, according to “Gang ‘Slang’ers,” in the New York Post. “It took us about a month to come up with our name,” said Piff Montana, a member of the Get Touched Boyz of Jamaica, Queens. … We wanted a name that would make an impact.” The full list of 300 or so gang names reveals a preoccupation with numbers and precinctspercentages: there are gangs called 5 Precinct Percent, 10 Precinct Percent, 40 Precinct Percent, and so on up to 122 Precinct Percent. (Hat tip: NameFlash. And thanks to Dave for correcting me on "precinct.")

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New additions to World Wide Words: eastwooding, mirror fasting, underbragging, and gramping. No, gramping is not a misspelling of glamping.

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Looking for a title for your book? You can’t go wrong with “The Elements of ___,” says Poynter.org’s Roy Peter Clark, who lists more than 25 knockoffs of the Strunk and White original. Here’s the one that inspired his post:

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Before she founded the online dictionary Wordnik, Erin McKean worked on the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, a reference that isn’t just for writers but is also by writers—i.e., various writers were invited to contribute notes on words that interested them. One of the writers assigned to McKean was the late David Foster Wallace, who, she writes, approached the copyediting phase as if “someone invited him to an all-day grammar seminar (with celebrity photo signings and vendor's expo hall), combined with a debating society picnic, where the topic was ‘RESOLVED: This Comma Should Be Removed.’ (You're not surprised, are you?)” Read the whole delightful account at “It was wonderful, marvelous, magnificent, superb, glorious, sublime, lovely, delightful ...”

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The Chamomile Tea Party was formed in 2010 as an alternative to “the rancor between the political left and right” in the US. It’s using modified World War II posters to get the point across, and you can view and download the posters on Flickr.

 

By outtacontext.

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In brand naming, many clients panic if a name is more than five letters long. According to Baby Name Wizard, there’s a contrary trend in baby-boy naming, at least in the US: fear of short names. Finn becomes Finnegan, Quinn becomes Quinlan, and—most boggling of all—Levi becomes Leviathan (“the twisted serpent to be killed at the end of time”) or Leviticus (the third book of the Old Testament, notable mostly for its litany of laws about skin diseases, sacrifices, and genital discharges).

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Fellow name developer Chris Johnson (aka The Name Inspector) has created my new favorite Pinterest board: the Wall of Namifying, “logos of companies whose names end with -ify (or, in one case, -efy).” As you probably know, I share his obsession. (And speaking of Pinterest, I’m trying my hand at a similar project: cataloguing the many, many -ly names and logos.)

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Linguist Arnold Zwicky collected some wonderful names of minor-league baseball teams, including the Albuquerque Isotopes, the Colorado Springs Sky Sox, the Fort Wayne Tincaps, and the Lansing Lugnuts. Then he followed up with an imaginary list of his own. I’m rooting for the Baton Rouge Compacts.

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From the Autoextremist blog, a slightly jaundiced guide to the latest auto-industry terms. An “accidental tourist” describes “executives devoid of the qualifications necessary to properly perform the duties assigned to them”; “greenage” is a program’s environmental potential. (Hat tip: Lance Knobel.)

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Speaking of jaundiced, there’s nothing like a Condescending Corporate Brand Page to say “We're a big corporate brand using Facebook. So look out for us asking you to like and share our stuff in a faintly embarrassing and awkward way.” Read more about the CCBP in Fast Company. (Note: the CCBP is British in origin—its URL contains “corporate bollocks”—but the themes are, alas, universal.)

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He is the very model of an amateur grammarian.

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I attended the Brand New Conference last year, when it was held in San Francisco, but couldn’t make it to New York for this year’s conference. Thankfully, organizer Armin Vit has compiled the best quotes and tweets from the event. Here’s a provocative opinion from UK designer Miles Newlin: “Stories have an end, and unless you want to think of your brand as having an end, then forget the storytelling idea, and forget people who talk about brand storytelling.”

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See what happened when New York Magazine sent a reporter to TechCrunch Disrupt SF to ask startup founders about their “chronically misspelled” company names. It’s, uh, Osom. (Thanks, Jessica!)

I Am Totally Over “-ly”

When I last documented another startup name ending in -ly—that would be Swipely, which I wrote about almost six months ago—I noted that by my count, there were 50 -ly names cluttering the Web and confusing customers. “Enoughly,” I declared.

But I declared too soon, or soonly. Since March, I’ve discovered at least nine additional -ly names attached to new companies or apps. It’s no longer a trend: it’s a plague.

The latest repetitive offenders:

Cofounderly: A couples app for startup founders, according to TechCrunch. “A simple, entertaining, and insightful way for busy cofounders to stay connected....and avoid a nasty startup divorce,” according to the iTunes Store listing.

Contently: “Empowering and connecting quality journalists and brands.” Also: “Anyone can be a publisher!” The emphasis is, presumably, on the first syllable. Instead of a mission statement Contently has a manifesto. Instead of a slogan it has a mantra: “Be awesome.” I may have to take up drinking again.

Diagram.ly: “Draw diagrams online.” Uses the Libya country code, .ly.

Dorkly: “Dorkly is videogame comedy. Like TV, but dorkier.”

Livingly: The new name of Zimbio, a celebrity-news website that’s been around since 2006. According to the TechCrunch story, “Livingly” is “a cross between ‘living’ and ‘lovingly’.” Seriously.

Mural.ly: Not for wall paintings: nope, they’ve redefined “mural” as “a flexible content format that aggregates media and files, ideal for group ideation and visual sharing.”

The company is based in Buenos Aires, which may explain the need for a pronunciation key. But it doesn’t explain why they didn’t go with the Spanish equivalent, “Muralmente,” which is not only an adverb but also incorporates mente, which translates to “mind.”

Refer.ly: Calls itself “a community of people endorsing things they love” in hopes that other people will buy those things, earning the endorsers a cash commission. I’m guessing it’s re-FER-ly and not REE-fer-ly. Warning: vertigo-inducing website.

Rexly: A music-sharing app for iPhone that—it says here—is “powered by magic.” The name may have something to do with the founders’ fondness for dinosaurs.

Swarmly: An iPhone app that helps users “discover the places where people are swarming to have a great time, right now.” Tagline: “Be part of the buzz.”

I also chanced upon one honorable claim to an -ly name. Gravely is not, as you might wearily suppose, a cemetery app but rather a lawn-mower company established in 1916 and headquartered in Brillion, Wisconsin (population 2,937 at the 2000 census). It’s named for its founder, Benjamin Franklin Gravely.

Gravely gets a pass. The rest of you clones need to hire a verbal-branding professional to push you out of your rut.

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Previously in the -ly files: Truly, Madly, Domainly; More -ly; The Unbearable Redunancy of -ly; Further Adventures in Namifying Trendily.

Hello, NewME. Haven't We Met Before?

I published a couple of posts in February—here and here—about a bunch of “new me” names: Numi tea, nu.me domains, Numi toilets, the Noomii “centralized online coach directory,” NuMe beauty products, and the NUMMI auto plant (R.I.P.).

Now, via TechCrunch, I’ve learned of yet another soundalike: NewME Accelerator.

 

It’s all lower case in the logo, but “NewME” in the content.

 

NewME Accelerator, which is based in San Francisco, was (ahem) new to me. I’ve since learned more about it from a couple of NPR Morning Edition reports (here and here). The venture sounds like a worthy idea: “a residential technology start-up accelerator/incubator for businesses that are led by under-represented minorities in the technology industry.” The founders of the fledgling companies move into one house and “eat, sleep, and breath [sic] startups.” During the 12-week program, the startups’ founders learn at the feet of venture capitalists and successful, experienced executives.

So far, so good.

Not so good: the NewME name. According to Monday’s NPR report—I couldn’t find this information on the NewME website—“NewME” stands for “new media entrepreneurship.” Unfortunately, though, the name doesn’t communicate that meaning: it sounds like a personal-growth/self-discovery course rather than a boot camp for tech startups.

And then there’s the problem of sounding “new” when there are so many other companies that sound exactly the same.

I was interested, too, in the names the startups have chosen for themselves. I hope part of the residency is devoted to rethinking them.

Especially these:

Whoorli wants to be “an easy way to promote your personal brand through video, picture, file sharing, and search digital content.” I’m not quite sure what that means, and I’m also not convinced anyone ever said “Whoorli” aloud. Because it’s thisclose to “whorely.”

Plisten is “a Social Site that Changes how You Interact with Corporate and Political Brands and Personalities”—and yes, all of the content is randomly capitalized and poorly punctuated. The name? It’s a lame portmanteau (I think the P stands for “political”) that conveys neither story nor benefit.

Dwllr “helps homebuyers, sellers and real estate professionals buy and sell real estate faster and completely online.” Here we have yet another name that sacrifices vowels (and good sense) in the interest of grabbing a cheap domain. Not to mention that it’s uncomfortably close to the established brand Dwell.

Of the 33 speakers and mentors identified on the NewME site, not a single one is a branding expert. That’s an oversight: there’s a lot more to starting a business than polishing your pitch and calculating projected sales. How about a half-day Naming 101 workshop, NewME? We’d focus on techniques for creating a name, strategies for securing a domain, and ways to develop a verbal brand. It’s not too late to fix those startups’ names.

April Linkfest

If you’re interested in English-language slang from the early 19th century—and who wouldn’t be?—you’ll want to follow @Vulgar_Tongue, which tweets citations from Francis Grose’s 1811 Dictionary in the Vulgar Tongue. A few examples: scandal broth (tea), sir reverence (a turd), and sea lawyer (a shark). The entire book is available online, courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

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“Eight-point type? I’m sure that’s legible” and other encouragement copywriters can give to art directors: Go Art Director Go. (Hat tip: Lori Burwash.)

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Cartoonist Brian McFadden totally nails the naming style of social-media startups in his Sunday New York Times strip. “Slackify”? Perfect.

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Past naming trends—remember all those “tronics”?—hold clues to the future of naming. Alan Brew, a principal at brand strategy firm RiechesBaird, makes the case.

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“Stop talking about names, start talking about characteristics of names”: good advice from Nancy’s Baby Names that works for the company- or product-naming process too.

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Episode 6 of Lexicon Valley, the linguistics podcast on Slate.com, is about how Scrabble, “a math game disguised as a word game,” reveals “the essential beauty of English.” The podcast features an interview with Word Freak author Stefan Fatsis. (All of the Lexicon Valley podcasts are well worth your time. Each one is about 30 minutes long.)

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What makes a movie quote memorable? A team of Cornell University computer scientists compared short, memorable lines from about 1,000 movies and compared them to other lines spoken by the same characters in the same films. Read about their findings at Technology Review (I love the title of their paper: “You Had Me at Hello: How Phrasing Affects Memorability”), then take the test yourself.

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To atone for her absence from blogging, trademark lawyer Lara Pearson of Brand Geek researched SORRY trademarks. She found 22 registered marks and 19 pending marks with SORRY in their names, including the famous board game, an apparel brand, and SORRY FOR PARTYING, “a lifestyle brand connecting those who need an elegant way to apologize for doing everything wrong, yet so right.”

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What’s the connection between hood, hoodlum, and hoodie? Jan Freeman of Throw Grammar from the Train investigates.

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Twitter’s “Who to Follow” feature is grammatically OK, writes Stan Carey. “Not only that: it sounds natural and normal, whereas whom in the same context runs the risk of sounding fussy, affected, and pretentious.”

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The hidden messages in 28 famous and not-so-famous logos.

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“The name of these cookies was changed from Blueberry Craze to the more prosaic Blueberry Cookie, so the sweets were less appealing to children.” A naming lesson from a marijuana bakery, via The Hairpin.

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Mike Pope is conflicted about typos. Or spelling errors. Or whatever you want to call them.

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URGENT REQUEST FROM MOOR OF VENICE and other Shakespearean spam from comedy writer Megan Amram, who(m) you should follow on Twitter, too. She had me at Bravest Avatar Ever.

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“When copywriter Robert Pirosh landed in Hollywood in 1934, eager to become a screenwriter, he wrote and sent the following letter to all the directors, producers, and studio executives he could think of.” It begins “I like words,” and it’s delicious. From Lists of Note. P.S.: Pirosh went on to win a screenwriting Oscar in 1949. 

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Fifteen minutes of literary bliss: former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins talks about the collaboration that turned some of his poems into short animated films. One of the best TED Talks I’ve seen.

The Unbearable Redundancy of -ly

I’d hoped never to revisit the subject of -ly names, which I covered—exhaustively, I thought—in an August post that listed 29 such names, including Chirply, Erply, Zerply, and Estately. But a news item on TechCrunch today makes a follow-up inevitable, if not welcome.

The item: Enterprise applications and services company Infor has paid $100,000 for Local.ly. “.ly” is the country code for Libya.

The same post noted that Facebook last month paid an undisclosed sum for Friend.ly.

Adverb-style names: the trend without end.

More evidence: Twitter friend Anthony recently pointed me to 500 Startups, which provides seed funding for new companies. Anthony wanted me to check out those companies’ names. “Brace yourself,” he warned.

Indeed. The companies themselves may be innovative, but you’d never know it from their names. We’re still seeing droppd vowls (Forrst, GoVoluntr, Redeemr, Spinnakr), diacritical abuse (Cădee, a golf site), multiple Dailys (DailyAisle, DailyGobble, DailyWorth), and -ly names. Lots of -ly names. (And one “-li” name.)

The 500 Startups roster includes:

Central.ly, “connecting local businesses to the web.”

Contactually, “an email interface for your CRM.”

Graphic.ly “provides an immersive social experience and marketplace around digital comics and associated merchandise.”

Lovely “takes the frustration out of your apartment hunt.” (I’ve included this -ly name even though it’s an adjective, not an adverb. To me it suggests a fashion or beauty site—or online dating—rather than “this lovely apartment.”)

Recurly “gracefully handles all the complexities of subscription billing and recurring payments.”

Rewardli “lets self-employed and small business owners leverage the buying power in their social networks so they can get better deals on the products and services they need.”

Texting.ly “enables businesses to easily and inexpensively interact.”

More evidence: Last week I read on TechCrunch about Womply (“Amazing offers loaded to your credit cards”). Womply has a cartoon mascot, Mr. Wombat. I can’t explain the shift from B to P; I’m guessing “Wombly” would have risked sounding like an obstetrics service.

Last week also brought news, via email, of Grammarly, which calls itself “the world’s best grammar checker,” an audacious assertion that remains to be proved. I ran a short passage from one of my recent blog posts through Grammarly; it dinged me on “passive voice use” and “writing style” without telling me why. If anyone’s tried the service and has good (or bad) things to say about it, please let me know.

And still more: Book.ly calls itself “the better way to buy textbooks.” Posterly has something to do with posters, events, and venues, but the writing is so vague and amateurish I couldn’t tell for sure. (“Browse posters, listen and see where it’s going on” does not tell me anything I need to know. “It”?)

Finally—or so one hopes—there’s Yummly (“Every recipe in the world”). The enterprise is well funded, the site is attractively designed, and the brand is cleverly extended (the blog is called “Nibbles & Bits”), but the name is, um, repeating on me.

If you’re keeping score, we’re up to 43 -ly names.

UPDATE: In a comment, Risa reminds us about this Tom Lehrer song for The Electric Company.

UPDATE #2, Nov. 11: Oh look, another -ly startup: Giftly.

The last laugh belongs to Jotly (“Rate Everything”), a fake and very funny enterprise from Firespotter Labs. Jotly’s home page declares “Everything about your life is exciting. To everyone.” The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal notes that the Jotly video “manages to send up nearly every startup cliché in just two minutes.” See for yourself:

September Linkfest

Case study: The rebranding of Hell. Logo, tagline, the works. From Chris Herron Design.

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What’s a pump? A ballet shoe? A trainer? Depends which side of the Atlantic you’re on. Linguist Lynne Murphy at Separated by a Common Language offers some British-to-American translation tips for shoe buyers; her commenters provide even more.

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Brave New Malden, “freelance copywriter with over a million years’ experience,” spots a trend in ad copy: “At A, we know how important B is. That’s why we C, which gives you D.” The two key words: “That’s why.”

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That’s why you’re sad: You’re suffering from jalopia, “fatigue with the laborious maintenance of having a body, a piñata of meat that’s incompatible with the Legoland rationality of the modern world, which was built for beings whose indestructible parts lock onto the Earth with a satisfying ‘click,’ whose emotions are standardized, whose mistakes are best measured in parts per million.” More flavors of melancholy—all invented, all invaluable—at the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. (Via @Wordnik and @Bookbench.)

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The reviewer calls the book “edgy,” “unflinching,” and “long-awaited.” What he means: “contains no adult voices of reason,” “has a lot of bad words,” and “late.” A helpful lexicon of publishing buzzwords from Janice Harayda and friends at One-Minute Book Reviews. (A few years ago I attempted a similar decoder for film-festival buzzwords like “haunting” and “bleakly beautiful.”)

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Linguist Geoffrey Pullum, the author of The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, responds in Lingua Franca to the latest nonsensical rant about the (mythical) decline of the English language:

What on earth comes over people when they write about language? It’s not just their ability to use dictionaries that disappears, it’s their acumen, their numeracy, their common sense. Show some people a single unfamiliar word and they’ll whip themselves into a paroxysm of fury, shaking their fist at what they see as a tsunami of black lexical filth sweeping in to destroy the whole of their native tongue.

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The entire Facebook terms of service in bro-speak. (“This is the Internet, bro; it’s like the fucking Wild West out there.”)

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This one’s for real: In 1986, Disney’s executives changed the title of the studio’s next animated feature from Basil of Baker Street to The Great Mouse Detective. In pissed-off response, reports Letters of Note, the film’s animators issued a fake memo announcing “the retroactive renaming of the entire Disney back catalogue, bar The Aristocats, in a similarly bland style.” Guess which title became The Girl with the See-Through Shoes? Via The Hairpin.

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Mashable reveals how Hipmunk, Zynga, and seven other tech businesses got their names. Most startups flop in this department, reports tech analyst Jeremiah Owyang, who attended TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco earlier this week and brought back dispiriting news from the branding front: “I strolled down the aisle with one VC friend of the 200 startups, we noticed they had ridiculous company names missing vowels and cutesy logos. The biggest set back, is the lack of positioning or even tag lines. A majority of the banners lacked a descriptor of what the company did. This is a big opportunity for PR firms to assist this early market.” (Spelling and grammar errors are Mr. Owyang’s. And by “PR firms,” he mostly means “name developers and design agencies.”)

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Finally, a name game to carry you through the weekend: Name That Thing, a visual vocabulary  test from Merriam-Webster. Each time you play, you get a new set of questions. “Addiction counseling not included,” warns M-W lexicographer Peter Sokolowski.

Truly, Madly, Domainly

Call it the redundancy of crowds. A few years ago, all the cool startups wanted baby-talk names: Meemo, Meebo, Bebo, ooVoo, Kwout, YooGuu, Doof, Thoof. Not in 2011: this is the year of naming adverbially. Some of the adverbish domains use the Libyan country code, .ly; others are .coms that incorporate –ly into their names. There are a lot of them, and what may have seemed like a clever idea at first—verbs! action! it’s how we do stuff!—is looking like a sad insufficiency of imagination.

The curious thing about naming trends is that none of the responsible parties ever thinks his name is a trend-follower. Oh no, every name is a true original! And ours is the best! Sure enough, when I singled out a few –ly names on Twitter, I got copycat responses: “But our name is cute!” “At least __ly has a double meaning!” “__ly is a great name! And we are dot com, not dot ly!” Sigh.

If you’re considering an –ly name for your new business, perhaps this list of 27 –ly names will convince you that it’s not very distinctive after all. By the way, I’ve omitted the –ly names already at the bottom of the dead pool: Slantly, Quotably, Smak.ly, Seriesly, et al.

Nicely Named: AlterGeo

Here’s a name that stands out for all the right reasons: it’s distinctive, it’s appropriate, it’s memorable, and it’s elegant.

 

 

AlterGeo reverses two letters in “alter ego” to create an ingenious name for a geolocation service that TechCrunch described as “the Foursquare of Russia.”

That’s right—Russia. Embarrassingly named North American startups, please note: The bar has officially been raised. This could represent a Sputnik moment for corporate nomenclature.

Complementing the AlterGeo name is an equally clever logo in which an upside-down “A” niftily reinforces the “alter” part of the name.

TechCrunch reported earlier this month that AlterGeo had recently raised $10 million from sources that included Esther Dyson, the very savvy angel investor and founding chairman of ICANN, which oversees Internet domains. I’ll have what she’s having.

Name Changers, Part 2

More stories from the Recent Name Change file:

In the beginning there was TweetPhoto, founded in 2009 to allow users of Twitter and other social-media platforms to share photos. In August 2010 TweetPhoto became Plixi and added a geolocation focus to the service. And on May 1 Plixi will change its name again—to Lockerz Photos , to show its kinship with Lockerz, the social-commerce network that acquired Plixi in January.

Congratulations to all concerned, but really: “Lockerz”? Enough with the hip-hop Z-plural, which was already looking dated in 1999, when Fox launched the Boyz Channel and the Girlz Channel—and when Lockerz’s target market of 13- to 30-year-olds was barely sentient. Even worse, Lockerz awards its users something called Pointz—it prefers that you call them PTZ—which can be exchanged for discounts or direct purchases. PTZ: it’s just a vowel away from “putz.” (Hat tip: Trochee.)

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Texas-based Seeing Interactive, which launched in January 2010 after three years in development, changed its name last month to OwnLocal. In addition to its original mission—helping newspapers take ad dollars away from the Yellow Pages—the company has added a daily-deals feature. Like Groupon, yes, but for “markets that haven’t even heard of Groupon,” according to CEO Lloyd Armbrust. “Seeing Interactive” was a less-than-optimal name for this combination of services. OwnLocal is an improvement, but not just because it’s shorter: interactive was boring and overly technical, and what does seeing have to do with ad revenue? OwnLocal, by contrast, contains the keyword local, communicates ownership, and incorporates assonance (vowel rhyme) to make the name more memorable and fun to say.

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Here’s a cautionary tale about names, language, and slang.

PinkelStar founder Alexander van Elsas had a great story to tell investors and customers: his company name was a blend of the color pink and Elstar, a Dutch apple variety. The –star suffix could be transformed into a versatile graphic element.

Founded in July 2010, PinkelStar (the S is lower-case in the logo but upper-case everywhere else), which provides tools for developers of mobile apps, got off to an encouraging start, with a $500,000 funding round and coverage by VentureBeat and TechCrunch. I’ll let van Elsas take it from there:

And then it all happened. After a TechCrunch post someone made an smart remark about our company name. Were we aware that ‘pinkeln’ actually means ‘to pee’ in German, and that we effectively managed to call our company ‘Peeing star’? WTF?

Our company is based in Amsterdam, Germany is our neighboring country. But none of us realized what PinkelStar translated to in German. We were hoping that developers would pick up on the benefits of our service. Instead that one comment lead [sic] to an entire new discussion.

The comment got picked up by ‘a few’ German Twitter users, and a ‘peeing’ storm was born.

Long story short: van Elsas and his team went back to the drawing board and emerged with a new name for the consumer service, Zwapp, and a related name for the developer platform, Zwapp Connect.

 

 

I’d have liked van Elsas to explain name choice. Is it as meaningless in Dutch (or German) as it is in English? Is it meant to suggest “zap”? Since the website and blog are in English, are we meant to give the name an English pronunciation, or is the W pronounced like V?

In any case, it’s an interesting choice with some positive non-urinary associations. I wish the company well. And I wish all startups would seek the counsel of professional name developers with strong linguistic skills before they make costly and energy-sapping mistakes. (Hat tip: @CalliopeCo.)