Naming Is Hell

Maybe it’s just me but nameinventing names is hard. Painfully hard. After countless frustrated hours you find a good sounding name. But soon you  discover it means something sh***y in another language. Or possibly someone has already trademarked your name. If all else fails you can be almost sure that someone has reserved your desired .com domain name long time ago and is willing to part with it – for a fee.

 

If you ever need to find a name for new company, product or brand I have some tips for you. I hope this helps you to speed up your naming process – drastically.

  • Try collecting some suitable keywords relevant to your service and combining them together in various ways. Maybe you will get lucky and find an excellent name. Some helpful tools (1, 2, 3) might assist you in this. Alternatively you can try inventing brandable name with little specific meaning. If you are really ambitious you can seek a word which can also be used as a verb.
  • Make sure your name is short enough and simple to pronounce. If you just say this name over the phone will the other person be able to correctly write the name down? How would your name sound if someone would say it in foreign language?
  • Google your name idea. You *really* need to do this to avoid embarrassing connotations and associations.
  • If you need a domain name associated with your name make sure to check availability. If you feel that good available names are impossible to find you can purchase a reserved domain name from a domain marketplace. If you want more comprehensive service you can purchase a reserved domain from a curated domain service (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Personally I like the curated domain service as they include baseline descriptions and logo proposals. My new startup domain name was purchased from curated domain provider BrandBucket. Thanks to all nice BB people and founder Margot for your innovative and excellent service 🙂
  • In case you have many prospective names you can pick few leading candidates and ask many of your friends to sort them in the order of preference. Aggregate the results and you’ll likely find that this kind of crowd-voting can pick up clear winning and losing names. If you disagree with the winner you do not need to pick that name, but if your preferred name is one of the losers you better think again!
  • If possible make sure your name is not trademarked. Check out ROMARIN. This is generally a good idea as trademark owner could for example lay claim to your domains and Twitter handle.

Smart People

smart_peopleWorld is full of smart and inspired people. Internet enables them to reach ever growing audiences and impact the world in new ways. They certainly have impacted my life and worldview.

My thanks to Marc Andreessen, Steve Blank, Andrew Chen, Sangeet Paul Choudary, Jason Cohen, Neil Davidson, Seth GodinBen Horowitz, Babak Nivi, Naval Ravikant, Joel Spolsky, Mark Suster, Chris Vargas and so many others.

TreeCreeper

bird-sightings-treecreeperTen years ago I started working with World in a Box, a small software development practice based in Southern Finland. This company makes software for engineers and scientists. Over the years I have worked with WIAB in various roles and capacity.

 

One software we created is called TreeCreeper. This software was designed with Carlo Ricotta and is used to study certain theories in plant ecology. Annali di Botanica has now published a research paper on TreeCreeper. I am proud to be listed as an author.

Delay

sorry-for-the-delay2There has been a rather long delay with UTU. Late last year was asked to do some high-priority work on other tracks. My UTU plans and value proposition also seemed stuck somehow, and I felt unable to continue meaningfully onward.

Thus I have been concentrating on other tracks for the past few months.

 

After this long hiatus my inspriration seems to be returning. The UTU track is now officially restarted and continuing onwards.

Charisma

charisma mythStandford has excellent online presentations for enterpreneurs. One of the presenters is Olivia Cabane Fox. Her presentation was good and I decided to buy her book.

This book is excellent. One of best books of this type I have ever seen. Some might think that book teaches manipulation skills, but that is not true. This book enables you to better understand yourself and make yourself understood by others.

I still feel really novice on all communication and charisma aspects. Hopefully I am slowly getting better. Let’s see how far this can go.

Pirated Images

Luffy_ChibiAll posts in this site have header images. There do I get them? Who knows, but I certainly am not always properly attributing the artists and copyright owners.

If you have copyright to any of these images and want me to either properly refer you or remove the art, please drop me an email. I will remove any offending content on request. Honest.

Project Takoha

Together with two friends we thought long and hard about copyright and how money could be collected to pay for the production and presentation of artistic work and performances. We figured out a system somewhat similar to Kickstarter.

After discussing the concept with numerous culture affiliated people we concluded that the concept did not excite them enough. We published our Takoha Manifesto and stopped the project.

Two years later Kickstarter went live.

lets care

Nepton

nepton_tunnusStartups and entrepreneurship are quite familiar to me. My parents are long-term entrepreneurs. My grandfather and great-grandfather built several companies from small shops to sawmills and industrial manufacturing companies. I know how sweet the success can be and how bitter the failures can feel.

Year 2003 was time for me to move onwards. During my time at Satama I had learned tremendous amount. My brother suggested that we combine forces and start operating under the wings of our parent’s company. I had my doubts and hesitated too much, but finally took the plunge. Soon Nepton Oy was born.

Nepton is (so far) the most successful startup I have created or co-created. We started ten years ago by doing IT subcontracting for various clients. One client project semi-accidentally became our first product. We actively developed this product line over the years, learned the ropes and increased our market coverage. Now we employ 10+ people in this SaaS business and are rapidly gaining new customers. Future of this business look quite positive.

During last ten years my main focus has been on different subcontracting projects. My roles in these have been a mixture of technology, design, planning, management and sales.

Many of my projects have been related to Nokia. At one time I was the technical lead responsible for UI layers in all Nokia websites. Later I moved to finance side and together with group of extremely talented people developed and deployed large planning & analytics system for use in global Nokia organization.

Other customers I have worked with or sold projects to include 3, dotMobi, Eläke-Fennia, Ericsson, GSM Association, HP, MacMillan, Microsoft, Orange Group, Otava, Sampo Pankki, Samsung Electronics, Satama Interactive, Sun Microsystems, Technical University of Denmark, TIM, T-Mobile, Vattenfall and Vodafone.