Creative product names: Mechanical Turk

Amazon has a knack for naming. The company is named after the longest river in the world – a fitting moniker for the biggest shop in the world. They have creative product names as well. Kindle is easily the best-named e-reader. A9 is a bit of a dud, but we’ll let that one slide. But by far, the best name out of Amazon is Where man meets machine

If you haven’t heard of it, Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourcing Internet marketplace that gives programmers access to people all around the world to perform tasks that computers aren’t good at. The name is thought provoking – you know there’s a story there even if you don’t know what that story is.

What is the story, you ask? Where you at, Deep Blue?

So what do you do when there’s a complex task you can’t get a machine to do? Get a person to do it. The connection to Amazon’s product couldn’t be better.

Mechanical Turk is a perfect example of a creative product name that most companies would shy away from. Risk-averse execs would say “…but it was a hoax!” Weary product people would point out that it might offend Turkish people. The important thing to remember here is that the name is great because it ties the product to a really cool story. And cool stories aren’t all sunshine and rainbows. They have deception and mishaps – just like real life. So we tip our hats to you, Amazon, for having the balls to go with a creative product name that has a great story behind it.

Mission complete, +5 mana. Check out some of our other naming posts.