Naming a Web Service?
You'd Better Hurry UpBy Elizabeth Gardner
Need to name your new Internet company, product or service? Desperately trying to combine "Cyber," "Net," "Web," or another wired prefix with some random word or syllable to create a moniker that a) everyone will remember, b) everyone will understand, c) no one will confuse with anyone else's company, product or service, and d) no one else is using anywhere in the world?
Don't bother, say experts in the naming realm. The search for good names, already hard enough, has become orders of magnitude harder since the advent of the Web. Your odds of creating another "Netscape" are about as good as your odds of creating another Netscape. Your best bet, some say, is whimsy.
"Eighty to 90 percent of the names we generate are legally unavailable, especially if they're based on real words," said Russ Meyer, director of naming for the corporate identity firm Landor Associates, San Francisco, which came up with the name Lucent Technologies for what was once Bell Labs, and WorldNet for AT&T's new Internet service.
Typically, a naming company will create a list of ideas, then do a preliminary search to see if they're in use anywhere before pitching them to a client. In addition to the traditional combing of trademark and business news databases, a Web search is now de rigueur, and that's where a lot of the list bites the dust.
"Because the barriers to entry are so minimal on the Web, vast numbers of names are being taken but not registered (as trademarks)," said S.B. Master of the San Francisco naming firm Master-McNeil, which created the name Netopia for Farallon Computing's family of Internet routers, and FirePower Systems for a company making computers based on the PowerPC chip. "They're accruing common-law rights based on their use on the Web," she said.
"The Net has made it that much harder to search and clear a name for use," said Sally Abel, a trademark specialist with the Palo Alto law firm Fenwick and West.
On top of that, plenty of names are being duly registered. In 1996 so far alone, 123 names have been registered with the U.S. trademark office containing the word "Web"; in 1995 it was 310. For all prior years it was a grand total of 54, and some of those (Webster's dictionary, for instance) had nothing to do with cyberspace.
Registered or not, a name used on the Internet automatically becomes global. "That means a lot of folks think they have a claim on the name you've chosen," said Steven Weinberg, an intellectual property attorney with the Phoenix firm of Lewis and Roca, and a member of the International Trademark Association's Internet task force.
Thinking up a new Internet company name is even more complicated because ideally, it should be associated with a corresponding domain name, and those are being snapped up by the thousands. Moreover, since only one company can use a domain name, the Net negates a traditional trademark principle that the same name can be used by companies that don't compete.
"There's a Champion that makes T-shirts and one that makes spark plugs," said Weinberg. "Which one should get champion.com?" (In fact, neither has it; visiting www.champion.com brings you to Mindspring, an Atlanta-based Internet Service Provider.)
And Nettish-sounding domain names are getting harder to come by. The list of domain names assigned by InterNIC, the name registration authority for the .com domain, is now more than 8 Mbytes in size and includes thousands upon thousands of domains that include the terms "web," "cyber," "net" and "internet."
But suppose you did hit on a unique combination? You might find yourself with a mixed blessing, said S.B. Master. "Do you really want to fight for recognition? Do you have the budget to make it stand out from all the others?" she asked. "It's better to forget the Net and pick something more arbitrary. Instead of Netseek, become Eureka!"
Fenwick and West's Abel concurred. "A descriptive name is great for marketing, but a disaster for legal, because it's hard to protect," she said. "Yahoo is a great name--it doesn't tell you anything about the product. CyberCash is a weak mark, because you can't protect against someone using CyberMoney or CyberDollars."
"The idea is to find names that don't tell people immediately what you do," said intellectual property attorney Weinberg. "Pathfinder is a lovely name: it suggests something interesting and new, but isn't directly descriptive."
Many turn to popular metaphors in search of names. Sun Microsystems' Java has led to an epidemic of coffee-type names among related products and technologies. The "Web" metaphor has spawned names both obvious (WebCrawler, a search engine, and Spider, an HTML editor) and obscure (the search engines Lycos, an abbreviation for the Lycosidae family of spiders, and Inktomi, a "mythological spider of the Plains Indians, known for bringing culture to the people").
Agents Inc.'s Firefly intelligent agent pushes the entomological boundaries further, though vice president of marketing Saul Klein said the name was chosen because it had a variety of associations. "Some people envision little pulses of light all communicating with each other," he said. "For others, it's a warm summer evening."
Exploration is also popular, with Navigator, Explorer and Magellan leading the pack. "The implication is that sometimes you get there and sometimes you don't," said S.B. Master. "A discovery metaphor might be more interesting." She also sees potential names in a space exploration metaphor.
The search for new metaphors is treacherous because the Web is so new that they all risk becoming dated, said Landor Associates' Meyer. "Who could have predicted what television would turn into, based on its first year and a half?" he said. "At some level, I'm waiting for the day that ïwired' appears on the ïtired' list."
Maybe the safest approach (from the standpoint of originality, anyway) is to give your product a name that means something to you, even if to no one else, and then trust to marketing to make it famous in itself. Qualcomm's popular Eudora e-mail program was named after one of the creator's favorite authors, Eudora Welty, in honor of her short story "Why I Live at the P.O." Yahoo is said to stand for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," though a company spokesman said the name really arose because founders Jerry Yang and David Filo "considered themselves yahoos."
Reprinted from WebWeek, Volume 2, Issue 8, June 17, 1996 © All rights reserved.
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