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For those of you who are too young to have lived through the original dot-com boom, I can't recommend this 1999 article on company naming from Salon highly enough:

http://www.salon.com/1999/11/30/naming/

Read the whole thing, it's hilarious.

As soon as I saw the parade of names in the OP I was reminded of one of the names the naming consultants in the the Salon piece devised -- "Jamcracker":

When Altman and Manning presented the name Jamcracker to a client recently, the reception was not everything they had hoped for. "I put the name up in front of their creative people," Manning says. "There were a couple of women sitting in. One of them got up and said, 'Oh, that's disgusting.' Another said, 'This is really sick.' I said, 'Excuse me, what are you talking about?' They said, 'We can't explain it, but that name is just creeping us out. We don’t know what it is, but could you take it off the wall, please?'" Manning remains mystified by the incident. "There's apparently some strange, uncomfortable meaning attached to it in the minds of some women," he says. "God knows what that could be."




I'm starting to head off-topic here, but that sounds like a scene right out of William Gibson's _Pattern Recognition_. The main character has an allergy to corporate branding and logos, and charges an absurd fee to sit in on a marketing meeting and simply give yea/nay judgements on logos. She can't explain why or how she can tell what's going to be good, but her judgements are considered gospel.


The Jamcracker Services Delivery Network (JSDN) enables Service Providers to unify the delivery of disparate cloud services to their direct customers and through their channels. Key features include:

http://www.jamcracker.com/

Oh goodness


Most of their Web site seems to consist of jargon and puffery--"across the enterprise," "enables" and "ecosystems."


They raised over $142M including $100M in one round in Oct 2000. Wired article:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.12/jamcracker.html


Many, many years ago, I worked for a company called "Inter-Touch". It's now owned by NTT Docomo. What can I say that has not already been said?


Amusingly, there is a business called Jamcracker:

http://www.jamcracker.com/

and, what's more, the copyright at the bottom of their website says 1999-2012. I wonder if the naming firm still sold the name after this article!


As the saying goes, there's a sucker born every minute :D

This got me wondering if the naming firm described as the minds behind "Jamcracker" still exists. Sure enough, it does:

http://www.ahundredmonkeys.com/

And they have a useful page listing all the names they've ever sold:

http://www.ahundredmonkeys.com/category/all-names/

Scroll down to "J", and... boom. "Jamcracker: Unified platform for IT management." Right between "Jacks" and "Jamoka."




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