Quirky names for startups first surfaced about 20 years ago in Silicon Valley, with the birth of search engines such as Yahoo, YHOO +10.81% which stands for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," and Google, GOOG -0.58% 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. online.wsj/article/SB10001424127887324263404578611772689785466.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories
Posted on: Thu, 18 Jul 2013 16:47:56 +0000
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