For those of you who are too young to have lived through the original dot-com boom, I can't recommend this 1999 article on company naming from Salon highly enough:
As soon as I saw the parade of names in the OP I was reminded of one of the names the naming consultants in the the Salon piece devised -- "Jamcracker":
When Altman and Manning presented the name Jamcracker to a client recently, the reception was not everything they had hoped for. "I put the name up in front of their creative people," Manning says. "There were a couple of women sitting in. One of them got up and said, 'Oh, that's disgusting.' Another said, 'This is really sick.' I said, 'Excuse me, what are you talking about?' They said, 'We can't explain it, but that name is just creeping us out. We don’t know what it is, but could you take it off the wall, please?'" Manning remains mystified by the incident. "There's apparently some strange, uncomfortable meaning attached to it in the minds of some women," he says. "God knows what that could be."
I'm starting to head off-topic here, but that sounds like a scene right out of William Gibson's _Pattern Recognition_. The main character has an allergy to corporate branding and logos, and charges an absurd fee to sit in on a marketing meeting and simply give yea/nay judgements on logos. She can't explain why or how she can tell what's going to be good, but her judgements are considered gospel.
The Jamcracker Services Delivery Network (JSDN) enables Service Providers to unify the delivery of disparate cloud services to their direct customers and through their channels. Key features include:
The first time we publicly demoed AppThwack it was pointed out. On the other hand, people seem to remember it and generally react positively. Who knows if it will stick, but we agree on it enough for now that it's better to focus on the product and getting customers.
I guess you haven't been to www.PENISland.com? For some years there was an actual page at the end if the DNS request. Now the domain hilariously redirects to www.penisLEND.com, which is funny and awkwardly enticing.
We've gone back and forth a ton of times, especially because of the obvious "Aflac" thing. We get a lot of comments that are positive, and of course some that are negative, but nobody seems to have a problem remembering it.
I'm way more concerned with providing a good product with a name that's "good enough." Also, it describes in slightly playful terms exactly what we do. We test apps.
The first time I say it out loud to someone there's often a request to hear it again. If they're a native speaker it generally clicks with an emphasis on "Thwack." If they're not, spelling it clears it up rather quickly. Usually it's because they've never heard the word before.
Once people get it they repeat it, likely because it's an entertaining and weird thing to say.
I agree with the advice that names should be easy to spell, but I also think it depends on context. Nearly all of our customer acquisition starts visually, either through the site, banners, or press, so it hasn't really been a problem.
Who knows if we'll keep it forever, but it's working for now.
