Wednesday, September 10, 2008

TechCrunch - hopefully the products are waaaay better than the names

Techcrunch_logo TechCrunch50 says this about itself. They have a "simple goal: find the best start-ups and launch them in front of our industry’s most influential VCs, corporations, fellow entrepreneurs and press. For companies who raise a gazillion dollars in venture funding, you would think they could fork over some money on a name. But, noooooooooooo. These are names that only a mother could love. That is, if that your kid came up with sucky names like Atmosphir, Bojam, GazoPa, PlaYce, Tweegee et cetera. Here are the 50 worst offenders out of the 52. (We spared DropBox and Footnote, which at least are whole word names.)

  1. Adgregate Markets
  2. AdRocket - so dot com sounding
  3. Akoha
  4. Alfabetic - see number 6 (below), same goes here
  5. Ångströ - oddly enough this company is based in Palo Alto, so what is with all the letter decorations?
  6. Atmosphir - silly silly misspelling - also unacceptable are Atmosfear, Atmosphear, Atmosfeyr and Atmosphyr
  7. Birdpost
  8. BlahGirls
  9. Bojam - unless this has something to do with Bo Diddley......
  10. Burt
  11. Causecast
  12. Closet Couture - for all the best dressed closets
  13. Connective Logic
  14. iamnews- iambored
  15. Devunity - finally someone brings all the dev's together
  16. DotSpots
  17. Emerginvest - a four-syllable suckvest
  18. ExchangeP - don't just exchange the P, the whole name needs to go
  19. FairSoftware
  20. FitBit - NitWit
  21. Fotonauts - Polaroids in Space!
  22. GazoPa - a subsidiary of parent company GazoGrandPa
  23. GoodGuide - BadName
  24. Goodrec - WorseName
  25. GoPlanit
  26. Grockit - Grok doesn't have a "c" but nice try anyway
  27. Hangout Industries
  28. iCharts - which decade is this again?
  29. Imindi
  30. LiveHit
  31. Me-trics - me-sick
  32. MIXTT - MIXXTTUP
  33. Mobclix- really...why not just say MobClicks?
  34. Mytopia - mytopia?, keep it then, we don't like it anyway
  35. OtherInBox - it's at least better than one of our favorite train wrecks Xobni (inbox backwards in case you didn't know)
  36. Personalria - Everyone needs a Personal Ria (a submerged coastal landform)
  37. PlaYce - whY?
  38. Popego - Pope Go?, Pop Ego?
  39. Postbox
  40. Quant the News
  41. Rinen
  42. Shattered Reality Interactive - who wants to interact with a shattered reality?
  43. Shryk - Shriek?, Shrek?
  44. Swype - someone swyped the i and rePlaYced it with a y
  45. Tingz - tingz makes us twingz
  46. Tonchidot - already forgot how to spell it, don't know what it means, so to find it on Google.....
  47. TrueCar - FalseStart
  48. Tweegee - sounds like something a one year old would say and no one would understand, and neither do we
  49. VideoSurf
  50. Yammer- best name here and perhaps not coincidentally the winner this year at TechCrunch!
Most of these miserably fail the Eat My Words world famous SMILE & SCRATCH test. We stand available to these companies to spend some of that TechCrunch VC money on a brand spanking new name. With our ROI, you'll get it back many times over.

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