When I’m developing something new, I always have a terrible time coming up with a name I really like. I spend way too much time obsessing over it. Web products have the additional burden of having to have an available domain to use. I’ve written before how we obsess over these things, but that I don’t think that names are a first order effect on the success potential of a startup. Still, I can’t help it. There’s some intrinsic attraction to the creative power of naming something wholly new.

While at boston startup weekend, it reminded me that I’m not the only one who has this obsession when creating new products. I decided to share some of the tools I’ve found useful in coming up with names, as well as a bit of workflow.

Usually I’ll come up with a few concept words that I think are representative of the product or idea. A good first resource is just using a thesaurus like thesaurus.com, to see if there are other related words to the first key words that might better embody the project idea (or maybe words that have a better sound).

Then I’ll usually use a few word / domain mashing sites to see if any combination of those words make suitable domain names that are available. I use Nameboy and Suggestly. These tools are useful because they automatically mash words together with other common domain words and simultaneously check domain availability.

The next step I usually do is to find rhyming words based on my keywords. Sometimes rhyming combinations can be compelling (think StubHub). Finding rhyming combinations that work is pretty tough, but it’s worth checking. I use a site called Rhymezone to check for rhyming patterns.

The last step I usually try is to take root, prefix, and suffix words that give the ‘feel’ for the product and use Wordoid to come up with “english-like” words that incorporate pieces of the words. Wordoid is, again, very useful because it checks the domain availability of the invented words as it generates them.

Another tool that I occasionally use, especially if I’m stuck, is Chris Pirillo’s Domain suggestion engine. The site takes a URL to any page and randomly mashes words from the page’s text together and checks the domain availability. It seems like it’s a bit of a side project and doesn’t always work, but it’s useful because it can act almost like random brainstorming. I’ve found it sometimes sparks me to think in ways I wasn’t thinking before. It can highlight words you might not have thought of, especially if you point the tool to a site that incorporates a lot of the concepts that are specific to your product.

This isn’t exactly a linear workflow. Each step usually sparks ideas that can be tried at the different points. Overall, it’s kind of like an internet assisted brainstorming session. Hopefully you’ll find these tools useful in naming your own web product. Don’t obsess too much though, there’s a lot of work to be done.

Louis Gray has a post where he declares that Google will never be “evil”. I found it very interesting for a few reasons. Why does Google seem so benevolent? Why do so many people implicitly trust them? As Louis highlights, part of it is the corporate culture they’ve built. I think, however, there is a more concrete reason, one that is not guaranteed no matter how much you want to like the company.

How many of Google endeavors really generate revenue? In my mind, there is only one reason why they are able to embark on so many projects that seem to place the users best interests first, because the whole company is subsidized by the real Google, the advertising company.

Google has the luxury of being highly profitable, which allows it to branch out in many non-traditional ways.

Asked what a business is, the typical business man is likely to answer, “An organization to make profit”. The typical economist is likely to give the same answer. The answer is not only false, it is irrelevant.

The prevailing economic theory of the mission of business enterprise and behavior, the maximization of profit [...] cannot explain how Sears, Roebuck or any other business operates, or how it should operate. The concept of profit maximization is, in fact, meaningless. The danger in the concept of profit maximization is that it makes profitability appear a myth.

Profit and profitability are, however, crucial – for society even more than for the individual business. Yet profitability is not the purpose of, but the limiting factor on business enterprise and business activity…
– “The Essential Drucker”, Peter Drucker
emphasis mine

Sure, you can argue that most of their projects to improve the web users experience ultimately benefit their ad business, but that kind of thinking is only tolerated when a company is highly profitable and experiencing significant growth. The only thing that needs to happen for Google to start acting “Evil” is for ad profits to decline and/or company growth to start missing Wall Street expectations.

You would immediately see projects that could only loosely be justified start to get canceled. Anything not generating direct profits would be scrutinized. If the ad business were to become really threatened, you would begin to see Google tapping a lot more of the value it has stored up in the power it has accumulated.

As long as things are going well, the decisions to create these projects, and the way they’re handled in “non-Evil” ways won’t be questioned. The moment that profitability comes into question, there will be a natural pressure to exploit Google’s power position. If the management, employees, and engineers are unwilling to exploit the advantages they’ve accumulated, it is highly likely they will be replaced by ones who will (implicitly by the shareholders).

publicenergy / CC BY-NC 2.0

For those that think Google can never be Evil, I hope they’re right. I hope Google always generates enough profits to place users, and user experience, first. I don’t think it can last forever. Their advertising cash-cow will being to dry up at some point. That will likely be the end of the benevolent Google. It is, after all, still a corporation whose business activities are limited by profitability.

A series of pictures that I took with my iphone in Munich.

Some pictures we took when we were on Plum Island a few months ago. Testing some mediaRSS modifications.

It’s been about two months since I opened up SnapMyInfo for testing, thank you to all those who have given the site a try! I thought I would write a quick post with an update on the project.

First, a thank you to Marshall Kirkpatrick for mentioning the project over on his posterous blog. That really helped drive several users to the site and uncovered numerous bugs that have now been fixed. SnapMyInfo was launched as an exploration of whether the concept of photo/barcode contact sharing is compelling or not. It was intentionally launched as a rapid prototype with limited initial testing outside the core functionality, so those first real users were a great help. Thank you all!

Many bugs have been cleaned up over the past several weeks. Some user contact “card” inconsistencies have been ironed out, as well as some problems with the registration process. SnapMyInfo emails (including registration emails) were being flagged as spam in some systems, so some work was done to help spam filters identify that SnapMyInfo emails are legitimate.

There was some feedback that users wanted to add social media contact information, so a place for twitter usernames and web urls has been added to the card editing interface.

This information is added to the vcard that is mailed out when the contact information is decoded.

Issues

Overall the reception to the idea has been extremely positive. There are some things, however, that seem to be limiting the utility of the system.

Visual Appeal

First, some people have commented that they think QR codes are ugly. I don’t disagree and that may be a limiting factor in what people are willing to use these codes for. I’m exploring alternative barcode formats, but most are proprietary and closed (or require large licensing fees to use). I’d like to use QR if at all possible, especially since there are a lot of free (or inexpensive) QR barcode readers for almost all handset platforms. I’m still exploring the possibility of adding alternate barcode formats to the system.

Speed

I’ve worked hard to minimize the turn-around time of the email based decoder, but I’ve found one environment where taking photos and decoding them is still too slow, networking events. Originally my concept for the project was that people would take pictures of the barcodes and then decode them in large batches at a later time (sending the batch of photos to the email decoder). Watching people in social situations, however, most people want the barcode decoded immediately. This works, and is reasonably fast, but during rapid networking, the total process of taking the photo, emailing, and waiting for the response is too slow to connect with several people at once.

In an effort to address this particular shortcoming, I’ve prototyped a secondary system for rapid sharing contact codes at networking events using live video streams. I displayed a prototype at the November MassTLC tech tuesday event, and it worked well. I’m exploring the possibility of using networking events and rapid sharing as the primary utility of SnapMyInfo, with the person to person sharing being a secondary benefit. (If you’re interested in possibly testing this system at a networking event, let me know: mikepk at tenzerolab dot com).

Next Steps

So I’m currently focusing on the rapid networking event system, but I’m still looking for feedback on the current site. I’ve got many possibly features I could add to SnapMyInfo, but I’m waiting until there’s more traction with the project. If you’ve got an idea for a feature, or are interested in something on the following list, just leave me a comment. All feedback is welcome and appreciated!

• Contact information redirect control
• General purpose QR encoder and decoder
• Twitter Sign In, OpenID, Facebook Connect integration
• Google Contacts Integration (This is 80% complete, but there’s been no real call for it yet)
• An iPhone app for snapmyinfo
• Geotag features
• Twitter and Twitter Lists Integration

Some pretty thought provoking ideas about currency and its implications regarding creativity, abundance, and the digital world. Not sure if I agree with all of it, but still interesting.

Web 2.0 Expo NY 09: Douglas Rushkoff, “Radical Abundance: How We Get Past “Free”

Found via FriendFeed user “Complex Days”

Chrome is going to be a major hit! Or err… maybe it’s going to be a huge flop. We have no idea.

In the throes of building my second startup, I’m acutely aware of one thing: time. Google doesn’t need to have a runaway success with ChromeOS (or Android for that matter) right out of the gate. They’re playing the long game, to quote a certain famous hockey player, skating to where the puck will be. They have the luxury of huge amounts of revenue and cash to be patient, to play the long game. If you have the patience to allow a product to find its market fit, you can allow it to organically find its niche.

I have one theory about where ChromeOS may be going. If you look at the capabilities of ChromeOS, it’s easy to dismiss them because of the lack of flexibility and native applications (especially games). There is one customer, however, that pops into my head that would love a tightly controlled, stateless, web client that could be centrally managed: the enterprise. I can easily imagine Google offering a hosted or even customer hosted version of this for corporations, not unlike hosted Google Apps. The savings in IT infrastructure (virus software, support, etc…) could be HUGE and very attractive to big companies. It would be a very interesting puzzle piece to put together with their google applications to drive potentially huge revenue from big companies.

Thats just one theory, but I don’t think we should be too quick to pan Chrome OS just yet. Truth is, no one really know where it’s going to fit into the computing landscape. Unlike most companies, Google has the luxury of time.

I just read a pretty stunning analysis over on, abovethecorwd.com (Bill Gurley’s blog, a VC with Benchmark Capital): Google Redefines Disruption.

I underestimated Google’s price/cost strategy, in my previous post. I thought they were going to allow market forces and free (both as in beer and speech) to bring cost of handsets to near zero for average customers. What I failed to realize is that Google is acting even more agressively than that with an even more disruptive business plan, ‘Less Than Free’.

Here’s Bill Gurley’s description of the less than free effect.

Google’s brilliance doesn’t stop there. It is hard not to have been surprised by the rapid rise in recent buzz surrounding the Google Android Smartphone OS. When I asked a mobile industry veteran why carriers were so willing to dance with Google, a company they once feared, he suggested that Google was the “lesser of two evils.” With Blackberry and iPhone grabbing more and more subs, the carriers were losing control of the customer UI, which undoubtedly represents power and future monetization opportunities. With Android, carriers could re-claim their customer “deck.” Additionally, because Google has created an open source version of Android, carriers believe they have an “out” if they part ways with Google in the future.

I then asked my friend, “so why would they ever use the Google (non open source) license version.” Here was the big punch line – because Google will give you ad splits on search if you use that version! That’s right; Google will pay you to use their mobile OS. I like to call this the “less than free” business model. This is a remarkable card to play. Because of its dominance in search, Google has ad rates that blow away the competition. To compete at an equally “less than free” price point, Symbian or windows mobile would need to subsidize. Double ouch!!

All I can say is… wow.

The coverage of the mobile space for the past several years has been entertaining to watch, especially where pundits declared devices from various manufacturers as sure-fire iPhone ‘killers’ (the wishy-washy ones appending a question mark to the phrase). Initially the focus was on spec sheets and touchscreens, the thinking seemed to be that a touchscreen was all that was missing from the iPhone’s competitors. It didn’t seem like these writers understood that the touchscreen, or any one particular feature, is not what makes the iPhone great..

As each would-be iPhone challenger is defeated by the incumbent, the tech press is shifting to the position that the iPhone is somehow unassailable. Robert Scoble, sparked a discussion about how the applications available on the iPhone insulate it from being disrupted. Applications do create a huge barrier for competitors, but only in the short term.

Apple is winning the handset battles but I believe it’s ultimately going to lose the handset war. We are witnessing a replay of the desktop operating system wars of days past, a new “pirates of silicon valley”. In this round, Google will be playing the part of Microsoft, and Apple will be playing, well, Apple.

Apple has created an elegant, integrated, computing experience. Its applications and functionality are superior in most ways to its competitors. This integrated experience has introduced millions of people to tremendous computing power in a much more accessible way. It is, however, a closed platform with a single hardware and OS provider. This has traditionally been the source of Apple’s greatest strength but ironically, it is also its Achilles heel. The parallels to the Macintosh computer are almost eerie.

Now an upstart competitor has appeared aimed straight at the intrinsic weakness in Apple’s product and philosophy. Google seems to be taking the Microsoft playbook from history, working furiously towards ‘good enough’ user experience. Android has invariably been described as clunky, not as slick, and not as functional as the iPhone. Making the software free, however, will allow thousands of hardware manufacturers to rapidly iterate on features and, most importantly, cost. The historical parallels to Windows PC’s is again eerie.

As more handset makers begin bundling Android with their devices, the cost for an Android-based smartphone is going to approach zero (especially with carrier incentives). Android will become the equivalent of Windows 3.0, clunky but “functional enough”. Its cost, though, will allow it to become ubiquitous.

I started writing this post yesterday, and today I see MG Siegler has written a post where he also describes this historical similarity, but comes to a distinctly different conclusion, that the tight integration and control will keep users on the iPhone. I think he’s missing the long game.

Google is banking on the unshakable core philosophy of Apple, and the power of market forces to eventually win the war, just as Microsoft eventually won the desktop OS war. While the tight integration and user experience will keep users on the iPhone in the short term, there will come a time when the price performance curve reaches the ‘good enough’ plateau. Sure there will be instability, market confusion, clunky interfaces, clunky applications, but Android will have one huge point in its favor, a trump card, it will be cheap.

What about the point that Scoble brought up regarding applications? This is the interesting part of the Google strategy. When billions of free handsets are given away running Android, which platform will developers create for? Sure it will be less elegant, less integrated, have more headaches (I even suspect some form of the ‘blue screen of death’ will appear on Android) but developers will be willing to work through all the issues. Just as in the Macintosh vs. Windows war, the deciding factor for developers will ultimately be market share and the potential user base.

Will this happen tomorrow? Will there be a single iPhone killer? I don’t think so. This will occur over a period of time when Android becomes the ‘default’ OS for all handsets. It will steadily progress, improving on each iteration just as Windows moved from being awkward and clunky (windows 1.0-3.0) to a real usable and almost elegant system (95, XP, windows 7).

Surely Apple knows its own history better than anyone, so it will have worked out ways to prevent this same fate from occurring, right? I’m not so sure. Just as I said before, the tight control and integration of Apple’s products is its greatest strength. It also seems to be a core pillar of the company’s philosophy. I think it will be nearly impossible for Apple to address this Achilles heel without spoiling its great success. Again looking to history, people have often said Apple should have licensed its software, the problem is, by doing that you destroy what makes Apple’s products great. It will be interesting to watch how this unfolds, and if, Apple has learned some market jujitsu to avoid the fate of the Macintosh for its new platform.

I think the eventual iPhone killer will be what makes the iPhone (and historically the Macintosh) great, the tightly controlled user experience. There will be no single devices that will be crowned the iPhone killer, but a death from a million cuts of ultra-cheap, gotten-for-free-with-your-plan handsets that will shift the phone OS consciousness to Android.

Update

Joe Wilcox (@joewilcox) has written a post with similar reasoning to my own. I agree with Joe, I think cost will eventually be the deciding factor for where developers (and eventually handset OS mindshare) will go. He has an interesting chart by Gartner that’s worth taking a look at.

I’m now actively seeking testers for SnapMyInfo! Check it out and let me know what you think!

What is it?

SnapMyInfo is my particular solution to a problem I invariably have: I always manage to forget my business cards. Always.

I wanted some kind of system where I could rapidly share my contact information with someone else, preferably electronically, and with my cell phone. I looked around at the various existing solutions to electronic contact sharing (boy are there tons) and they all seem to suffer from the same basic problem, both sides of the exchange have to be setup just right. Sender and receiver both have to have the same kind of phone, or have bluetooth with just the right settings, or have the same specialized application running. I wanted a solution that could work for almost anyone.

So how does SnapMyInfo work?

SnapMyInfo’s contact info

SnapMyInfo works by associating special square (2D) barcodes with your contact information known as QRcodes. QRcodes are not new. They have been a big deal in Japan for years but they’ve never really seemed to take off here in the States.

I had a simple thought, what if there was an email service that could decode these barcodes in photo attachments. In that way, anyone with a camera phone and access to email could use the system. That’s the genesis of SnapMyInfo.

Connecting with someone is easy. You simply take a photo of their code, email it to the special address in the image, and snapmyinfo will send you an electronic card for the person in vcard format. More advanced users can take advantage of any one of the existing barcode scanner applications to speed up the process, but they’re not required.

My original vision for this would be that a person would save their barcode as an image to their cell phone. That way, when you want to connect with someone, you can show them the picture on your cell phone screen and they can then take a picture of it and email it to the decoder. Then you never have to carry business cards. Anyone with a cell phone camera and email can connect with you.

SnapMyInfo Promo Cards

These barcodes, however, present an interesting opportunity to act as a bridge between traditional paper business cards and electronic sharing. Taking pictures of phone screens is not the only way they can be used. Including a small copy on your business card creates a simple way for people to scan paper cards. Putting them on t-shirts or other ‘real world’ stuff gives you another way of sharing your contact information. There are many possibilities for how this can be used

Feedback!

I would love to hear real world experiences with the system. What works, what doesn’t, what could be improved. I’m also interested in unique applications of contact sharing, creative ways these codes can be used.

Known Issues

• SnapMyInfo was designed to share contacts in vcard format since that’s a fairly universally recognized contact format. Unfortunately Android phones do not understand vcard format. I’m currently working on integrating Google contacts with SnapMyInfo so that Android users, as well as anyone who uses google contacts for their contact management will be able to use the system.
• The decoder has some problems with photos taken at steep angles. The system uses a lot of image processing to work with blurry, noisy, and photos generally taken in less than ideal conditions. I’m continually improving these processing techniques so they should get better over time and the next processor I’m adding is one to work with highly skewed codes.

TenZeroLab

SnapMyInfo is also the first project in my new venture TenZeroLab. With TenZeroLab I’m trying to build projects more quickly, create so-called minimum viable products and see if anyone actually finds them useful. I really want to avoid building a giant massive FNAC (feature, not a company). I intend to write more regarding my vision and purpose with regards to TenZeroLab in a future post.