It all started, I think, with Flickr: the cute, in-the-know jokey misspellings and then, soon enough, the simply crazy-ass names for Internet startups.
Full disclosure: I once worked on a site called Zulio (short version: Yelp meets Craigslist). One of the founders pulled the name out his ass, but it did have a nice ring to it. Certainly better than Yelp, which unfortunately is the perfect description of 99% of their content.
What Do These Seven Companies Do?
- Kinvey — Social Family Tree?
- Clinkle — Tomorrow’s Diapers, Made in Germany?
- Viggle — Samwer brothers’ clone of Worms.com?
- Yerdle — Yelp for Yodelers?
- Reactr — Flickr for Physicists?
- Convercent — Low-Cost Language Training?
- Booodl — Next-Generaaaation Blooood Bank?
These are just some random examples found on CrunchBase. I thought I should make this a quiz, but I’m sure somebody else has already done that better than I could anyway. See this startup name generator for example. Though it’s old-school compared to these crazy new names.
Sometimes I wonder whether all the super-cool Budapest bar names look this way to people who don’t speak-a the magyar. The key difference of course being that for those of us who do the names are multifaceted wordplay, and as with much Hungarian humor they assume a sharp wit. Is there an equivalent hipsterese dialect in which these startup names are less ridiculous?
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