We spent days coming up with the name infovark.

Yes, really.

Naming a company or a product is harder than you might think. It’s tough to find an interesting, unique and concise name that expresses the goals of the project in a memorable way. We consulted the Name Inspector, Vitamin, and Guy Kawasaki’s blog for help. The global nature of the Internet and the importance of keyword search means that most of the obvious — and not so obvious — company names and domain names have already been registered.

After much brainstorming and headscratching, we turned to the Dotomator in desperation. We entered all sorts of words and phrases we thought expressed our company’s unique vibe. No luck. We tried nonsense words, a la jabberwocky. We tried swapping prefixes and suffixes. Then, as a joke, we started randomly combining bits of these words with colors, numbers, and animals in classic Web 2.0 style. One of the sillier results was “infovark.”

After we stopped laughing, we spent hours looking for something better. But we kept making dumb jokes about infovark. No matter what else we tried, nothing felt quite right. With misgivings, we grabbed the domain for a boring corporate name instead. We gave ourselves email accounts. But it was infovark that captured our attention.

Ultimately, we decided that despite it being a bit weird, infovark was the most memorable of all the names we tried. So that’s what stuck.

Now that we’ve had a chance to reflect a bit, it’s not a bad choice. It turns out that few things dig faster than an aardvark. It’s a great metaphor for search, one of the key technologies of Enterprise 2.0. And since we’re a company that makes software for knowledge workers, we liked the idea of having an animal that roots around for tasty morsels as a mascot. Besides, who can resist the consonance between knowledge workers and infovarkers?

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