Why Startups Are Sporting Increasingly Quirky Names - WSJ.com: "Quirky names for startups first surfaced about 20 years ago in Silicon Valley, with the birth of search engines such as Yahoo—which stands for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," and Google, a misspelling of googol,” the almost unfathomably high number represented by a 1 followed by 100 zeroes. By the early 2000s, the trend had spread to startups outside the Valley, including the Vancouver-based photo-sharing site Flickr and New York-based blogging platform Tumblr, to name just two. The current crop of startups boasts even wackier spellings. The reason, they say, is that practically every new business—be it a popsicle maker or a furniture retailer—needs its own website. With about 252 million domain names currently registered across the Internet, the short, recognizable dot-com Web addresses, or URLs, have long been taken. The only practical solution, some entrepreneurs say, is to invent words, like Mibblio . . . " (read more at link above)
Editor's note: Actually the supply of 5-6 letter dot coms is still very, very plentiful!
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