Choosing a Name
Something every new company has to do is choose a name. Of course the hardest part of that is getting a domain name that works. Today marked the end of a several month effort to name the company. We’ve been Machine Phase Systems during the stealth phase of the company, but we’re getting ready to come out later this week. The name we have chosen is “Wink”.
Interesting thing about the process is that you can’t just brainstorm good name ideas and then decide on the name you like. Most, if not all, pronounceable domain names are taken. In earlier times, like the 90s, the domain you want might be owned by an individual, company or speculator, and you could negotiate a price to purchase the name. The prices got insanely high in 98 and 99. But in 2001 and 2002 they’d come down.
What’s new is that domain aggregators own the vast majority of domain names - tens or even hundreds of thousands each. They use the domains to get what they call “direct navigation” traffic - basically people who attempt to type URLs directly into the address bar of the browser but don’t enter the name of a real company. They show ads on these pages and earn money when people click on them. Some aggregators do search engine optimization so that their domains get to the top of a search result. For example the domain “diveinfo.com” has managed to get to the top of a lot of scuba diving queries, even though there’s no meaningful information there.
The difficultly for someone naming a company is that most of the domain aggregators don’t want to sell the names at any price. They view them as income producing real estate. Some names earn a large amount of money. But even those that earn just a few bucks a year aren’t for sale, because they figure if you’ll pay $X for it now, someone else will pay more than $X in the future. (Many gold mines leave most of their gold in the mine and sell it on the futures market, and only mine it as needed or if the price goes up.) So that takes hundreds of thousands or even millions of name right out of the market for companies.
Gina Bianchini at Ning helped us a lot with our naming (as did Geoffrey Arone at Flock). Her recommendation was to start by looking at what names are for sale and seeing if you like any of them. So we set aside our favorites and began looking at what was for sale and found a few interesting names that might have worked. But all the while we kept trying to contact those companies who owned the names we like. Eventually we’d heard back from many of them. Some of the prices they are asking now are getting very high. (Another sign of the second Internet bubble economy? - but fortunately none quite like we were seeing in the 90s.)
Finally over the past week or two we were able to negotiate for the name Wink, and check it out from a legal and trademark perspective and just today we secured it for real, and got DNS rerouted. The actual domain transfer will take a few more days.
So that’s us - Wink. And none to soon. The T-shirt order had to go in today 
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