We have dreamt up two company/product names since forming our start-up — Viisys.com and E20portal.com. We also named our blog’s Nickpoint.co.uk and Simon’s (my co-founder) bakingnoodles.com. I’d like to say it got easier finding a name each time but it didn’t. It takes lots of ideas and investigating. However it is creative fun. Our five factors in choosing a company or product name in order are:
1. A good URL & domain
2. Short name
3. Descriptive name
4. Memorable name
5. Balanced lettering
The biggest challenge is getting a good URL. We felt a .com address was one of the most important factors because we’re a tech company.
We now need another name for our new software product. At least we are versed in company/product naming. For our primary product we wanted an English dictionary name to make it easy to spell and remember. Trouble is all the dictionary URL words have gone! There are lots of tech companies with combinations of words e.g MindTouch; SocialText; Thoughtfarmer, etc. However many URL combinations of two dictionary words have also gone!!
After brainstorming several hundred names we decided on Aware. We then tried many, many word combinations with Aware. Eventually we took the Jive approach. Jive is a social software company and their URL is Jivesoftware.com but they are known as Jive. Our new product is a monitoring service, so we’ve joined Aware and Monitoring and voila awaremonitoring.com 
Right, time for the logo next..
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