Naming a company is hard.  The wife of a friend of ours suggested the name DoBox (for a box that 'does stuff') but there were people who worried it had a less savory connotation and so, when we got our funding and recruited a marketing team, we thought it would be a good idea to have them help us develop a new name.  We never changed it.  Nothing they came up with (and it was a creative team) seemed to be worth the time, effort and disruption that changing the name would bring now that we'd used it for over a year.  You do see companies who change their name, but it's not trivial, so give good thought to naming during your startup process.

I used to think that you had to have the domain first (in the late 1990's/early 2000's), but Seth Godin says that you need a name that works in the search engines too!  Lots of people "type in" domains to give it a try, but many many are "asking Mr. Google" if they want to find you - so he suggests having a name that is easy to search for without any weird spelling.  Of course he named one of his new gigs Squidoo......

My advice, better have have a good domain name that is also easy to google.  Please don't do what the law firms do, you know clzLAW.com or aygPAT.com (respectively for "law" and for "patents" after the initials of the first 3 partners)  ARGH - not obvious and not easy to google either because you have to be able to spell out the firm name correctly!

I don't have any magic bullets, naming your company is hard.  However,  here are some basic tips to avoid naming stupidity

• Don't name it after yourself, your dog, your kids or your mother-in-law
  
• DON'T use initials!
  
• One word! (I know, that was two words...)
  
• Make your name one word long
  
• Add a smart tag line to describe you - we're "Enclavix, Media.Organized" 
  
• All right, some smarty is going to say that Nicole's not a marketing genius on the name etc, but it's to illustrate the point!
  
• Best if it's only two syllables, but this IS 2006 and that's sometimes hard to do!
  
• Don't make it descriptive ("Sam's really cool analytical services" is really NOT cool)
  
• Make something up so that you can own it and create a brand behind it
• Example, our new company is "Enclavix" from the root word "Enclave"
  
• Do be careful of "inappropriate" connotations in most languages where you'll be working (the infamous story of the "Nova" in Mexico - where it means "No Va" or Doesn't Go)
• It's going to take time, over quite a bit of time, to brainstorm a lot of different names, and evaluate them, so as soon as you start working on your plan and concept, feel free to start working on naming.
• Take into account the domain name/search engine issues.  I often use the Smart Search domain name search functions at Godaddy.com to let some automated tinkering happen if I have some decent root concepts.
  
• Root concepts don't have to be "literal" to the product (what does Enclavix have to do with our Digital Shoebox?  Nothing!  But we think it invokes a nice embracing team ethos, which supports our products that protect, organize and enhance digital memories)
  

Anyway, this musing on names was prompted by a funny thing.  I am having trouble getting Technorati to let me "claim my blog" (very annoying).  So I did a search on "DoBox" thinking that if it had finally found Startupnotes.com, that it would be about the only blog in the world referencing "DoBox". 

Boy was I wrong! 

There were pages and pages of references to DoBox, just not MY DoBox.  Instead, there's a new company, started in 2003, named DoBox Recordings.  No, neither of us have the DoBox.com domain. Netopia must have just let it expire, so it's now some stupid collection of links.  Here's a hot tip, if you sell your company and you believe that your firm name would reflect on you in the long long term, put as a term of the contract either that the acquiror will hold the domain for 20 years and point it to their website, OR that they will transfer it to you at no charge if they choose not to continue to use the domain!  I started linking to the wayback machine just to prove DoBox once existed and wasn't something lame!

So, I dropped an email to the guys at DoBox Recordings (yes, they even used the same capitalization) to wish them luck with the name, I told them it had been good to us.  However, this brings up a really interesting long term issue for the US PTO.  DoBox Recordings is a "netlabel" for the music industry.  Would they have been infringing on our name, DoBox, Inc. in the software space?  How do you define "room for confusion" in the mind of the customer when it can all appear on Google or Technorati?