About 3 weeks ago, our venture fund was named Neuron Ventures. Then we had to change it. We spent $500 to do a trademark search and found at least two other people with names close to ours and in our industry.
What a completely saturated world of names this has become.
Between cybersquatters, the limit of our vocabulary, and the creativity of wordsmiths there is very little left.
So to name something, you first brainstorm a whole bunch of names. Then you do domain name searches. After all, how can you do business in 2006 without a website? Once you find an unused domain name, it doesn’t stop there. You need to search for close prefixes and word portions and also potential variants in combinations with the name. Any variants close enough to be possibly associated or mistaken for your name need to explored then for working in your industry.
For our previous name, Neuron Ventures, there was already a Neuro Ventures out there, as well as a Platinum Neuron Ventures. Both were venture funds so we had to ditch our name and get a new one. Thus, we did not want to risk a cease and desist letter from someone who feared we could be infringing on their name, and we did not want others mistaking us for them and vice versa.
If only we had done the name search in the beginning….spending $500 to save ourselves from this grief would have been a small price to pay.
At some point, it will become a serious problem for the entire Web. The namespace is getting extremely filled up. How long before 99% of the words you could come up with are already taken? It’s almost getting as bad as trying to pick a new email name on Yahoo! Mail or AOL. Would Neuron Ventures have to become Neuron_Ventures_2938182? You’ll have to spend a million bucks to hire a professional naming firm just to come up with a new name!
The new name for our venture fund is Chroma Ventures.