Oxford University Press "The Making of a Name" by Steve Rivkin

"What signs did naming companies put up to tout their services? Oddly enough, their names were not particularly innovative. Some relied on the surnames of their founders, principals or partners: Addison, Landor Associates, Ashton Brand Group, Rivkin & Associates, and Master-McNeil. S.B. Master, a founder of Master-McNeil in Berkeley, California, told a reporter she'd added McNeil because "it had a substantial sound. From day one, potential clients have always assumed we were big and important, even though we weren't when we first started."

"Some firms sounded soulless, Slavic or enigmatic, like Luxon Cara, Igor, or Interbrand, or baldly laudatory like Enterprise IG and the Belgian firm Remarkable. Some, like Lexicon, Idiom and Metaphor, Paris's Nomen, and Stockholm's Skriptor, appeared to borrow from a university's Language and Literature Department. One web listing in 2003 showed nearly seventy employed "brand," "branding," "name," or "naming" companies, including NameTrade, NameLab, Name-It, Namestormers, and The Naming Company. It listed companies from Absolute Brand and ABC Namebank to Trading Brands and Wise Name."

"The most evocative name for a naming company was A Hundred Monkeys of Mill Valley, California, responsible for Raindance (web conferencing), Jamcracker (information technology) and Ironweed (a venture capital firm). The Monkeys' moniker was based on the apocryphal idea that if you parked a hundred monkeys in front of a hundred typewriters, they would eventually come up with all of Shakespeare. Or at least Hamlet."

(Quoted from "The Making of a Name," by Steve Rivkin and Fraser Sutherland, published by Oxford University Press in 2004)