Javia blog

It’s a little shame that I don’t have the name of my project yet. Shouldn’t everything start with the name? Well, I started the development when I still didn’t have the name. But at least an internal name is needed in order to be able to talk and think abount something.

So I use the internal name gama. Why gama — because it’s short and easy to type on a phone keyboard. But now the time has come to finally settle the official name. I spent about 2 days thinking about names. One problem is that I seem to focus on names that are directly related to what the product is doing, names that contain inside either ‘java’ or ‘mobile’. It looks like (Igor’s naming guide) that these are not the best names for branding, that the really good names are imaginative, and related to what the product is doing in a subtle or metaphoric way.

A suitable name needs to be:

• available in .com or .eu TLD
• memorable (i.e. you remember it once you see it)
• short, easy to type on a phone keyboard

Of course, these criteria are hard to meet. In the .com TLD, a huge number of domains are owned by the name pirates, who keep them for advertising income or name trading. This situation is really annoying.. I’d say 80% of the domain names are used in a such bad manner.

In order to be memorable, the name has to make associations, and it doesn’t hurt to be melodic, and beautiful. My situation in this area is a bit difficult as English is not my native tongue.

The last criterion — to be easy to type on a phone keypad — is a novel one, I guess. The ideal name would be composed of first-letters on the phone (i.e. A, D, G, J, M, P, T, W), and successive letters in the name should not be located on the same key (because this slows down typing). Yes, I even wrote a small program which, given a text, outputs its cost with respect to the phone-typability metric.

So I put up a short list of candidate names (which mostly suck IMO) and asked my friends what they think about them. Most of them are available only in the .eu domain, not in .com … I’m not sure how serios a problem this is, of course I would prefer a name in the .com TLD.
Now I can’t wait to decide for a name, register the domain, and move ahead with the real work. If the name would be really bad, it will still be possible to change it later, but before the public launch. It’s hard to find a good and available name.. perhaps not a programmer’s job, anyway…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 31st, 2006 at 01:28 and is filed under Javia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.