Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 30th April 2009
2 COMMENTS 
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
A good name is very important if you are starting a new project. It helps if you have something cool to refer to and it gets things moving. So one of the first things I do if I start thinking about a new project is the name. And a good name is no good unless you also have a good domainname attached to it.
Often people complain that all the good names are gone online. This is not true. All good names are still available! You just have to know how to find them…
Here is how we come up with names for our projects:
1: Collect a lot of related words
Take a few minutes and just brainstorm and try to come up with a huge list (about 100) of related words. If you get stuck just go to Answers.com and look up some of the words you came up with and read the descriptions. This will immediately lead to more new words.
2: Get a dictionary and a needle
Take a dictionary, close your eyes and use the needle to go to a page and select a random word. Do this 10 times. Don’t forget to write down the words and read their descriptions. This leads to more words too.
3: Don’t use a browser to check for domainnames
Don’t check for availability by typing a name into your browser. Use InstantDomainSearch.com and Nameboy.com to easily check names for availability and more brainstorming. Nameboy will give you lots of suggestions and alternatives. InstantDomainSearch uses an AJAX interface to check for domainnames instantly.
Bustaname.com is a new service and great tool for finding names. You can enter several keywords and it will check for combinations of those words with ‘le’, ’ster’ and other options.
4: Invent your own words
Combine words in original ways. Doing something with email and photography? Try ‘Emailography.com‘ (Still available!)
5: Get inspiration from others
Google and Feedster are good names. So if you want to do something with the name ‘John’ (see tip 6) try ‘Johnster.com’ or ‘johnle.com’. Just add ‘Le’ and ‘Ster’ to each keyword you came up with and see what that leads to. Popular these days is to add ‘get’ before your product name (GetClicky.com and GetSatisfaction.com).
6: Buy a second-hand name
All good names are gone? Well yeah, but they aren’t always in use. A lot of great names can be bought secondhand at Sedo or similar domainname collectors. We bought Fleck.com second-hand for a few thousands dollars and always thought it was a great investment. In fact, searching for names at Sedo is a great of coming up with new names. Just enter one buzzword (like ‘RSS’) and Sedo will give you a list of domainnames which contain those characters.
There are more benefits to buying a name this way: If you have an older domain Google will trust you more than if you registered your domain one week ago. Fleck.com got visitors right from the day we went live. A lot of those came from google and other search engines. We now are the first result that pops up if you search for Fleck.
7: Browse a supermarket, library or fishing supplies store
or any place with lots of strange words to get inspiration from. Just browse the aisles and write down all words that are cool, strange or interesting for your business.
8: Translate to Spanish, Greek and Latin
Get some of the related words and translate them into spanish, italian, danish, latin and greek. Answers.com will do it for any word you look up. Just scroll down on every page.
9: Rmove some or all vwls
Take your related words and remove all vowels (A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y) and see what you get. If that leaves you with a too short word only remove a few vowels and try again. Examples: ‘Exmpls’, ‘Etctra’ and ‘Cmputr’
10: Call your mother
Seriously! When you are thinking about your business you often are blinded by technology and company slang. Explain your business to an outsider and ask them what a good name would be. Try you mother and your crocery clerk and the homeless guy asking you for spare change.
My mother came up with several names for several business including the name for my personal holding Bomega and bomega.com. I asked here if she knew a good name and without thinking twice she said “‘Bo’ for Boris and ‘Mega’ for the amount of money you will make becomes ‘BoMega’”.
I rest my case…
Written on 17th February 2009
75 COMMENTS
David Petherick, Contributing Editor, United Kingdom
I spoke to Aaron Gotwalt, Co-Founder, VP Products, and Jesse Engle, CEO, at CoTweet today, (third partner Kyle Sollenberger was out when we spoke) and I think they’ve just found a way for Twitter to grow up as a marketing, engagement and customer service tool. It’s called CoTweet.
Their news at CoTWeet this morning is that the Ford Motor Company have just signed up to start using CoTweet – and the product proposition is simple: CoTweet powers your brand on Twitter. And of course, @cotweet is on Twitter. Who knew about Ford?
With CoTweet, you can track exchanges with customers via simple case management, assign tasks and followups for multiple individuals within your company, and automatically assign signatures to identify the individual talking on the company’s behalf. All just using a standard web browser.
At the moment, the CoTweet product is in private Beta, and I have used the service for a number of days. That has been long enough to convince me that CoTweet is a ground-breaking product that solves an simple but potentially overwhelming problem – how to use twitter in an effective way across an organisation.
CoTweet solves a real problem
Its origins are from a real-world issue within a startup – where members of a small team were stepping on each others toes trying to respond through twitter to customer queries. Different responses, no response, nobody aware which queries were outstanding. The idea to solve this went from concept to beta in a little over a month.
Companies no longer can decide whether they should be on Twitter – they need to decide how they are going to manage customer expectations using Twitter. The core problem is managing a Twitter account across an enterprise. Who has dealt with that customer enquiry? Who can deal with that product query? Can a way be found to ship or modify something in a tight timescale? Twitter is beginning to be used as a front-end tool not just for ‘inbound’ functions like technical support and customer service, but also ‘outbound’ for marketing, sales, and PR. It is becoming a holistic tool – which may be fine for the small company, but potentially a nightmare for anything that scales beyond a small team. It helps 1.0 companies get powerful 2.0 capability – easily.
CoTweet knows about scale
CoTweet is built on a scalable, cloud-based computing platform, and the founders have already been planning ways in which it might integrate with CRM systems, help desk applications, and the likes of salesforce.com central core and associated applications. The important differentiator though, is in allowing the brand to retain a human touch. It can be used to refine and improve implicit workflows within organisation, but with the objective always being focused on something very simple – satisfying an individual who has used twitter to make an enquiry, and having an individual within a company easily identified as the agent who brought that about.
Show me the money
In terms of how CoTweet plans to monetise – “the macro model is already there – but there is a lot of detail on the micro model which is being discovered in the beta testing that’s taking place at the moment”. CoTweet is evolving a Community of Practice, and recognises that using Twitter is new, and the way that people engage with it and use it is new. Their beta customers can learn a great deal from each other’s experiences – and CoTweet is working with Jerry Michalski to build up what they term ‘cohorts’ of non-competing businesses who are using their product, and are sharing best practice and experience with each other.
You might be able to help – try the Beta
What CoTweet are looking to gain from talking to The Next Web at this stage in their development is to have more European startups and corporate customers take part in their limited beta, and become involved as ‘cohorts’. They also stated their firm intention to take part in The Next Web 2009 Startup Programme and win their way through to present on stage in April in Amsterdam. CoTweet also told me they are aiming to bootstrap all the way through to a public launch with a product that people will be paying to use. I can’t see them having any problem reaching any of those three goals.
Big bird in a dark suit
CoTweet recognise that social media needs to grow up, and that services need to present themselves in a professional manner, and use professional language, in order to get serious traction beyond the early adopters. So I don’t think that CoTweets cool blue-grey imagery, so reminiscent of LinkedIn, is used entirely coincidentally. It’s a clever twitter bird in a pin-striped suit that can talk to creatives, accountants, marketing and customer service directors. The summary statement which encapsulates why I think CoTweet is a game-changing and compelling proposition that virtually demands companies use the service, is here:
Companies will use CoTweet as the core tool to engage with people through Twitter.
That may sound like wishful thinking, but for a product that is designed to scale, works well, does something nothing else out there can do, and offers a capability every company using Twitter needs, I’d say it’s more like a promise. This company is going to fly.
Written on 10th September 2008
1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
So far, London-based Webjam has resisted the temptation of going after the Facebook-kinda audience and remained the focus on B2B. I wrote about this start-up in July, when they closed a €1.9 million round of funding. The BBC once called the iWeb-like community builder “better than Facebook”, and this could have distracted them from their real objective: mobilizing the crowd for companies and organizations. They’ve now released a product that brings this goal closer, called Branded Services.
Brand managers can use the tools and structure of Webjam to give people an opportunity to “befriend” their brand. Sort of like a Facebook company profile, but then with more control for the brand manager. If you look at the page of The Other Side Magazine, only the top bar gives away that we’re dealing with a Webjam page.
Although larger companies won’t feel the need to join Webjam, simply because they have their own outlets, smaller companies might be interested in creating a Webjam-based community. Instead of hiring a developer and designer, The Other Side Magazine only had to subscribe to Webjam’s services and
now their members can write their own blog posts, comment on almost every piece of content, maintain their own profile, publish their own “art”, and have discussions in the forums.
So while many social networks are struggling with their advertisement-based business models, Webjam will happily sell licenses to mid-size companies.
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
