Name your company automatically

There are a number of services on the web that promise to name your company without any human involvement–you know how messy dealing with people can be. They are typically called automatic name generators and may spew out choices one-by-one or by the hundreds.

So I decided to put a few of them through their paces. The problem I set up was that I wanted to start an ice cream company that will fight global warming. I thought the hot-cold thing would be a good test of machine creativity.

Now I have to confess that in the battle between John Henry and the steam shovel, I was on John Henry’s side. I wasn’t exactly rooting for the automatic name generators to fail. But I wasn’t betting on them either.

My first stop: noemata.net. Their random name generator has been “naming stuff since 22 july 2000.” I liked the way they pinned down the date it went into service but the results were, true to its name, totally random. There wasn’t even a place to type in “ice cream.” The name it gave me was FLATHET. After several more tries, I got names like MULTIP, NONSOX and JUNODUCE. This machine clearly did not have a brain.

Looking for some comic relief, I found myself at norefuge.net, which was immediately appealing because NO REFUGE ICE CREAM made sense as a name for my company, although it was missing the hope factor. But norefuge.net is actually the home of the Video Game Name Generator, which was pretty hilarious, even though it, too, was completely random. How can you resist a video game called MYSTICAL GIMP DEATH MATCH or ALLIED HAMMER GANG? Even KOSHER HORSE RACING ENCOUNTER had some weird kind of class. It’s easy to get distracted when you’re looking for a name.

Then I made my way to Adam Podolsky’s site, wordoid.com. I liked the fact that somebody was willing to take responsibility for the machine, and that it had a real name that was even copyrighted. Wordoid can think in four languages. But unfortunately it can’t think too good. It only works with a single string of up to 10 letters–no spaces–so I couldn’t type in “global warming” or “ice cream” for that matter. But I could type in “gelato” which I did and Wordoid came back with ANGELATORE, TREASONGELATO, and ELECTRONGELATO. I sort’ve liked the last one but I’m making ice cream, not gelato, and anyway I couldn’t get from electron to global warming.

Next week: more attempts to find a machine that will name my ice cream company that fights global warming.