The 15 dumbest names for Web 2.0 startups
Story byRobin Wauters
Robin Wauters is the European Editor of The Next Web.
He describes himself as a hopeless cyberflâneur, a lover of startups, his family a(show all)Robin Wauters is the European Editor of The Next Web.
He describes himself as a hopeless cyberflâneur, a lover of startups, his family and Belgian beer.
If you’d like to know more about Robin, head on over torobinwauters.comor follow himon Twitter.
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1. Adaptive Blue
Develops personalization technologies that leverage semantics and attention.
My guess is they absolutely wanted to use the word ‘adaptive’ but were unable to get the right domain name, so they just picked any color and magically combined the words into something horrendously unmemorable.
2. Thoof
Personalized/social news recommender
Thoof. Pfoof. Floof. Any startup that gets named after a farting sound deserves to be on this list. Enough said. Note: Thoof wasreportedly deadpooled, but the domain now points to Reddit. I wonder if this was a generous last configuration of the owner or an unreported acquisition?
3. Weebly
AJAX website creator
Weebly hassomering to it, but compare it to the names of their closest competitors (Synthasite, Webnode, KickApps, etc.) and it sounds more like a kid’s toy, or an adult website. I’m guessing ‘weeb’ is supposed to make you think of the term ‘web’, but I’m really not sure. According toUrbanDictionary, it can also refer to a monkey penis or someone who would do anything to get some attention.
4. Yoono
Social link and tag sharing network
Yoowhat? A typical example of a startup so desperate to have a two-syllable name that they’d have picked anything that sounded remotely pronounceable. Except of course you’re likely to forget the name or the spelling of it after a heartbeat.
5. Zlio
Gives users the ability to create their own shops and sell goods from other e-commerce services.
A ‘z’ isn’t meant to be followed by another consonant, and there’s a good reason for that. It’s not only hard to pronounce – I personally tied a knot in my tongue -, it’s also extremely forgettable.
6. Diigo
Social annotation service
Using ‘ii’ in your name is never a good idea. There’s absolutely no way you can talk about your startup without having to spell its name for people to actually find it on the web. When I search ‘digo’ (the most logical keyword to use when you hear the name), you won’t find it, but you will come across aninternet phone serviceon the first page.
7. Heekya
Social storytelling platform
Whatever a ‘social storytelling platform’ is, it doesn’t even matter if the name ‘Heekya’ doesn’t even refer to anything. I would love to see their employees pitch normal people about their service in plain English. And what’s with the dots above the e’s?
8. Insala
Web-based software for organizations implementing talent development, management, and retention initiatives.
Is this the name of a trendy salad bar? An islamic prayer? Or is it a synonym for Innovation, Customer Responsiveness and Focus, Employee Satisfaction, International Reach, Entrepreneurial Accomplishment and Rapid Growth? You guessed it, it’s supposed to be the last one.
9. Jiglu
Automatically creates intelligent tags for your web content.
While Jiglu on itself is already absolutely meaningless, painfully undescriptive and just not very catchy as a term, the entire product line is named after it: JigluTags, JigluHood, JigluMedia and JigluEnterprise. As if it was actually meant to create confusion about everything the startup produces.
10. Mzinga
Bbrings white-label social networks to consumer research.
Just like ‘z’ isn’t meant to be followed by a consonant, it’s better not to put it after a consonant, either. The word ‘Mzinga’ makes me think of an African warlord, or an exotic Hawaiian dance routine, but it certainly won’t make me go “Aha, that’s that white-label social networking site creator”. Gotta wonder how to came up with that one.
11. Oooooc.com
Provides a marketplace for contents and services.
Much likeZooomrandooooj, it’s just too many o’s. How do they refer to their service? Worse, how do they point people to their website on the phone? “No it’s 5 o’s, c, dot c-o-m, sir … No no no, 5 times the letter ‘o’ … ah crap.” If you want to be the next-generation eBay, you might want to consider changing the name first, guys.
12. ooVoo
Attempts to add the human experience into communicating online with improved video and voice communication tools.
Same story as Yoono: it may sound pronounceable, but the fact that’s is so damn hard to remember the name and the spelling thereof doesn’t justify picking a two-syllable word. I mean, it sounds like an evil spell or a character from Star Wars.
13. SocialThing
Synchronizes your personal information, content, and friendships so that you can post this information across the social web.
It’s really hard coming up with a good name that starts with ‘social’ anymore these days, but if you’re going to do it anyway, why pick something so blatantly generic as ‘thing’? It’s like they couldn’t figure out what their own product actually did, and they just talked about it as some ‘thing’ they were coding. Oh yeah, and the exclamation mark thing was very cool in the nineties.
14. Sclipo
Social learning network for teaching through video & webcam.
Say ‘sclipo’ out loud. Enough said, right? It sounds like a name that’s been incubated by someone with a speaking disability. It reveals nothing about the product, which is fairly niche to begin with. Nada, zip, rien du tout. The only thing it makes me think of is the Roman politician Scipio.
15. CrazyEgg
Advanced analytics to track what your users are doing on your website.
This one, like Weebly, has some ring to it and with so many competitors it’s probably meant to stand out just a little. But CrazyEgg? Crazy. Egg. Sounds like they really wanted to have a logo with an egg in it and found out crazyegg.com wasn’t registered yet, so they just went for that name.
Did I miss any good, well, bad ones?
Let me know in comments what you think the dumbest name for a Web 2.0 startup is!
