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Coming up with a name for your product is no small feat. You’d want it to sound interesting. To allude to the function of the product yet not too narrowing in scope. To be short enough to be remembered if it is a made-up word. And if you are naming a dot com, you would want it to have as many vowels as possible (see vowel-to-consonant ratio of “Google”, “Yahoo” and “Amazon”).

After some initial struggles, one of our early advisors Ken suggested “anoby,” based on the formal name for bookworms - “anobium punctatum.” We then changed it to “anobi” on the ground that it looked better in small caps.

But the domain name “anobi.com” was already taken. We decided we wouldn’t throw away our name just because the domain was unavailable. How about adding something extra to the end of the domain name? The last letter of the name was “i” which meant adding any consonant after it would make it look like it was part of the name. So we tried “anobii.com” to go with our name “anobi”, and that of course confused everyone.

The breakthrough came when we realized “anobii” actually looked more like a worm than “anobi” so finally we decided to go with double “i”s. We are pleased with it. We wish you like it too.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 8th, 2006 at 11:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.