Categories
- Benefits (5)
- Company News (40)
- Enterprise 2.0 (107)
- Information Management (23)
- Keep It Together (8)
- Product Announcements (36)
- Productivity (15)
- Software Development (31)
Company news, plus our musings on Enterprise 2.0, organizational culture, knowledge workers, and information management
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?
For most people, the use of the nominative plural pronoun (‘we’) tends to refer to themselves and to the other significant people who happen to be sharing their lives.
If you work for a company, or any kind of collaborative venture where there are multiple people working towards a similar goal, you’ll find that you use the word ‘we’ an awful lot. For example ‘We need to refactor that code, and we should probably add some comments’ or ‘We need to get our TPS reports done by Monday’.
I think that the use of the word ‘We’ is one of the nicest things about being at work. That one little word indicates collaboration is occurring. It shows that you accept some joint responsibility for your success (or failure), and it reminds you that you’re all in this together. Whenever you start a new job, or a new project, the first few times you say it, you notice that you just said it. It’s a thing, at first. Then it quickly becomes part of the corporate vernacular, and you aren’t as aware of it anymore.
Personally, in the last five years, most of the time I said ‘We’, I was referring to TOWER Software. TOWER make a well regarded ECM suite called TRIM Context, which is designed for the government and highly regulated markets. After 5 years, I decided that I was brave/crazy enough to try something on my own, and was fortunate to find a kindred spirit in my TOWER Colleague, Dean.
And so for both of us, Infovark is a new kind of ‘We’. We‘re a small startup based in Northern Virginia, who have a vision for changing the way people work together.
Anytime somebody says ‘We’, we want Infovark to be there supporting them. To make it easier to share information. To help them make decisions. To help them get to know each other. And to take away the burden of complex, enterprise software that is hard to use and understand.
It’s an ambitious goal, but it’s one that we’re utterly committed to.
And so, it starts! We hope you’ll stick with us, and share the journey.