Re-Naming Our Baby

It seems that I am forever stuck in cycles of bestowing a name upon something.  When I was a child it was pets, all through high school and into college it was band names, in recent years it has been baby names and now it is a new name for Digital Positions' baby: i3SiteTools.  It's a funny thing naming something. It can't be too anything --- too short, too long, too goofy, too stodgy, too literal, too obscure, too common, too touchy-feely, too corporate. It's like a Goldylocks nightmare. Now amplify this unwieldy list of requirements by eight strong-headed individuals and you have a recipe for a deadlock.

An additional wrinkle that makes the task nearly impossible is the fact that naming anything plausible that has to do with software or technology has already been taken, or at least the domain name is already spoken for.  I challenge you to come up with any color of the rainbow and tack 'software' onto the end of it and do a Google search.  Try any fruit for that matter.  I am beginning to see why so many companies are simply making up words these days: Assurant, Allurant, Cingular.  Soon, there will be nothing original left except for random strings of consonants, or the bizarre onomonopea like 'ewwww...' or 'fwapp!'

We have been through so many lists of candidates to replace i3SiteTools at this point that my eyes are starting to cross and I am starting to wonder, is the name really that bad?  Apparently, it is confusing and unmemorable to many of the folks who have worked with it over the years and we are taking the opportunity with the open-source release to re-brand.

We have commited at this point, and we will stay the course, passing around untold numbers of Excel spreadsheets ranking shiny new name candidates like: 'Hum', 'Blue Matter' and 'Slingshot'.  And we will continue to make sour faces at these trite suggestions by co-workers only to offer up our own soon-to-be-shot-down monikers like: 'AwsomeInSite' or 'SiteOPlasm'.

Stay tuned. The new name will rock like none other... or if it doesn't, keep that to yourself ;-)