Naming Notes: TechCrunch40

Last week the influential technology blog TechCrunch hosted its two-day annual conference, TechCrunch40, at which forty "of the hottest new startups from around the world" unveiled their products. I didn't attend (if you want an insider's view, Sylvia Paull offers a slightly jaundiced one), but I did take some time to consider the hot companies' names. Here are my short takes on five of the forty.

8020 Publishing, in San Francisco, "brings together the best of the web and print." Numbers are showing up in company names in some interesting variations (see, for example, my post on 23andMe), and this one strikes me as especially smart. In a company blog post notable for its thoughtful tone, founder Derek Powazek explains that "8020" comes from the "80/20 rule," also known as the Pareto Principle, which postulates that 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the effort. "We chose to name our company after this magic ratio," Powazek writes, "because we wanted to embrace the way communities form online. In our experience, to maintain a healthy online community, you need to maintain another 80/20 split: 80% readers (the silent majority in any community, sometimes called lurkers), and 20% writers (the vocal minority, the people who power the conversation)." A sophisticated logo underscores the intelligence of the name.

Cake Financial, also in San Francisco, is "a free online service that makes it easy to follow the portfolios and the real-time trades of your family and friends as well as top-performing members within the Cake community." The juxtaposition of "Cake" and "Financial" is surprising, and that's the point: The founders are positioning the company as an alternative to conventional financial services. Yet the name isn't frivolous. "Cake" is a strong, simple word with multiple associations--from the delights of birthday cake to "have your cake and eat it too" to "icing on the cake." (OK, it's also in "Let them eat cake," which may not be as bad as it seems.) Cake Financial gently pushes the metaphor in its slice-of-cake logo--I like the way it challenges the "pie" chart cliché--and in a section of the website titled "Why Cake Is Good for You."

Spottt has a cute doggie mascot and, yes, three T's, although its logo makes the name look more like "SpotIt." The business, which hasn't yet launched officially, will provide free link exchanges, which explains the provisional tagline: "You Pet My Back, I'll Pet Yours." For my money, the unnatural spelling screams of domain desperation: I'll bet the founders tried for Spott.com, which is parked and probably has a high asking price. If three consonants are the start of a trend, I hope it's a short-lived one.

Viewdle, based in New York, Kiev, and London, is "a facial-recognition powered digital media platform for indexing, searching and monetizing video assets." So there's a reason for "view" in the name. But there's no excuse for a name that everyone is going to hear as "Futile."

Xobni, another San Francisco startup, is "inbox" spelled backward. The founders explain on the About page: "We started Xobni because we realized there was an amazing opportunity to leverage our abilities in machine learning and statistical modeling to 'take back' the email inbox for our users." OK, now I get it. But I still can't pronounce it--not even with the little long-vowel-sound bar over the "o" in the logo. Zohbnih? Ex-oh-b'nee? Fuhgeddaboutit. Some words just don't swing both ways. (But at least one prominent venture capitalist thinks the Xobni service is the bomb.)

Comments

[Jessica]

Very interesting. I am surprised not to be horrified on the trademark protection front. For the most part, I can't even begin to guess what most of these companies do based on their names, so I think few would be refused registration on descriptiveness grounds, if that were a goal. Least favorite of the bunch is probably Extreme Reality as "extreme" is very tired, IMHO. Favorites: Definitely Cake Financial and Mint. Maybe I like the unexpected juxtaposition of food and finance?

[Nancy Friedman]

Jessica: I like Mint, too--its logo depicts mint leaves and its tagline is "Refreshing Money Management," which is nice. And of course "mint" has the additional meaning of "a place where money is produced."

[Mark Gunnion]

Ha! I agree, Cake is a great name. It came from those clever gals over at Eat My Words, the food-naming specialists, which is kinda funny.

http://www.eatmywords.com/

I tried to name that company earlier this spring. Apparently, before they hired her, the Cakesters were looking at Alexandra's namer party pics and found me there. I must have looked real name-y or something (The Gandalf look helps a lot in creative work).

However, I didn't come up with anything as cool as Cake, and they eventually broke down and hired Eat My Words, who did come up with something that cool, so all props to Alexandra for that great solution.

I also wanted to say, about Xobni, that you should not assume that the hip graphic designer actually knew what that diacritical mark meant. Remember Blak, Coca-Cola's coke-and-coffee mix breakfast drink (Yum!)? It had a long vowel symbol over the "a". They couldn't have meant it to be "Blake", could they?

Maybe it's just a graphic motif now in this QWERTY/ASCII world.

update: Oh, wait, it gets better! On all of the official Coke sites, Blak is capitalized BlaK. Oooh! Terminal caps! I've never tried to sell those. Maybe I'll try that on the project I'm working on today...

http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/style_design/article/0,28804,1609195_1609006_1608487,00.html

Of course, throughout most of the rest of the Google trail for BlaK, nobody else capitalizes it the way they want. This is a familiar problem to me, after my year at marchFIRST. Heads up there, c'eed!

[Nancy Friedman]

Mark: Thanks for cluing me in about Eat My Words! Interesting way to diversify, eh? Perhaps they were inspired by Tomato Bank, which I've written about here: http://nancyfriedman.typepad.com/away_with_words/2007/01/they_say_tomato.html. What's next, an insurance company called Fries With That?

As for the long-vowel symbol: D'oh! I should have known better than to assume a designer would make that connection. I myself have had designers delete my commas and change lower-case words to capitals "because it looks better that way."

[Mark Gunnion]

BlaK update #2: Seems like they started out with the straight long vowel mark, but have since changed to a wavy line. They must have gotten tired of hearing the copywriters and editors calling it Blake, because at some point in the product's short history, they changed the mark, so now it's a wavy line that looks like it was clipped from the swoopy Coca-Cola logo!

http://blog.thisnext.com/storage/lg_blak.jpg

http://www.thecoca-colacompany.com/presscenter/img/imagebrands/downloads/lg_blak_8oz_bottle.jpg

Check it out - the early "new product" stories feature the straight line, but the updated official Coke sites all have the wavy line!

Literate consumer outrage in action!

[Dave Blake]

Thanks for the link to the demythologizing explanation of poor Marie Antoinette's unquote. (I mean, she had to deal with spiders in her hair, the woman has suffered enough.)

But while we're straightening out cake through history, we should also note that "You can't have your cake and eat it too" is just plain wrong: you can perfectly well have your cake, then eat it. The original phrase is "You can't eat your cake and have it too," which really IS impossible. I forget how it got turned on its head.

And speaking of which (I don't expend much effort on segue construction), Engels never said "Marx stood Hegel on his head," aNOTHer politically generated, Marie Antoinette-like misquote. He said, "Marx found Hegel standing on his head and righted him."

So there, judgment of history, please try to pay more attention to detail. Meanwhile, thank you for your rush work on the George Bush administration. There's still enough time to remove him beFORE he pardons each and every accomplice and war criminal.

--daveB