More -ly

The little adverbial suffix is really getting around in startup-land. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about 27 company names that end in –ly or dot-ly (the Libyan country code). Here are three more I recently discovered.

Versly calls itself “a better way to work together” inside Microsoft Office. The San Francisco startup (started by a team “comprised of [no! no! no!] serial entrepreneurs and rockstar talent,” just like all Bay Area startups) was recently acquired by Cisco but appears to be keeping its unexplained name.

Forkly is a new iPhone app that “shows you where to go and what’s tasty there.”

Erply sounds like a symptom of gastric distress—perhaps what you’d say after being too successful with Forkly—but it isn’t: it’s a new credit-card-payment system for the iPad. Before the recent launch of that application, Erply, which sometimes likes to spell its name in ALL CAPS, provided business-management services to small companies. Erply was founded in Estonia in 2009, but “ERP” isn’t Estonian: its an acronym for enterprise resource planning.

Then there’s a red herring: Zerply, “a professional network built around people who love what they do.”

One of the founders, Christofer Karltorp, is Swedish; another, Taaniel Jakobs, is Estonian. (Does “urply” sound particularly euphonious in Estonian? Anyone?) Adverbs were not on their minds, according to the About page:

The name Zerply, which is derived from serious play, came to C and T in the wee hours of the night in Tallinn in the summer of -09.

Got that? They somehow elided “serious play”—charmingly accented, no doubt—into “Zerply.” Which does not sound like either “serious” or “play” to a native speaker of English. No, it just sounds like another dumb portmanteau. Go figurely.

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Hat tip to Karen for the Zerply lead.

Comments

[Cori Kesler]

I just discovered http://www.zaarly.com/ .... Seems to me that if you startup is going to end in "ly" it should be zaar.ly -- isn't that the point?

[Lauren]

I'm sure you're not bothering to keep a list any more - or it's simply to hard in the face of such an -ly onslaught - but I'll add www.dorkly.com which does gamer nerd comedy.