Hey, I am working on a business name generator: http://www.nameamigo.com/

The idea is that you can chose a category, or enter a custom description of your project/business. You can enter full sentences and it will parse out stop-words and punctuation as well.

Do you think this is a useful tool? Are there improvements that should be made?

I am programming it in Python and using the Flask framework to do web routing. The application is hosted on Heroku.

http://www.nameamigo.com/custom-word...business+names

ironically, "amigo" doesn't show up anywhere.

I"m not a UI expert, but I think using CamelCase isn't very good for the average user and I think tossing a list of 20 names at a time is better.

I'm guessing this works by iterating over the keywords and concatenating random words? Have you heard of ontological databases?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2...ology-database

In the year 2016, a business name is worthless if the domain name isn't available. There are domain-name generators all around the web, but I'm not sure how you hook into the domain registry.

http://impossibility.org/ is a decent example.

http://tiffzhang.com/startup/

Random startup generator

Not meant to discourage you. I think it's a good idea for a project

I think there are some questionable businesses from that one...

http://tiffzhang.com/startup/?s=140770383075

Thanks for the input.

I found the name NameAmigo with my generator. I was originally calling it NameMyProject, and then NameCraft, but both those names were taken with the .com.

From what I can tell also, domain registration seems to be a much bigger field than name generation itself. I'm also looking at some more niche fields like hashtag generation, or other reasons somebody might want a name.

I'm learning some maching learning techniques to try and make it so the names will be better, and the algorithm can learn what is a good name. Will take a look into ontological databases as I have not heard of it before.

Was showing 1,000 results to test the speed of it, but long term less will most likely do.

Any thoughts on what font or display would be better than CamelCase?

Yea, there is some competition in the field. From what I found for "business name generator", this one by Shopify is the best: https://www.shopify.com/tools/business-name-generator

It looks up .com extensions as well pretty quickly. Although it can only take one word as input.

I think the next step may be to look up how to check quickly if a .com is taken or not.

Not my universe, but I imagine there are some open APIs to some registrar or an open source project on github that does this?

Who is your target market? If it is 99% of meat space, a typical technophobic business owner using Square Space is going to think CamelCase is some scary programmer ****. On the same token, it isn't so bad to have all down case next to since so many urls are hard to type and read if the words don't match well: spokeeentertainment.com is horrible to look at.

Check if the ".com" is available and only display those as an option would be an interesting addition.
If you're generally interested in providing a nice tool for naming stuff I'd recommend reading "Hello, my name is Awesome". Nothing ground breaking but I read it recently.

If you really want to go the distance...maybe integrate mechanical turk to have people read the name out loud and see if it comes back the same if played through voice recognition?
[it's really good to have a brand name that will be used correctly for searches by Siri etc.]

Also useful: Auto check if a certain banlist of words is in the name (expertsexchange), autocheck for curse words etc. in foreign languages, autosearch us trademark office site thingie

Do urls even matter any more? 90% of the time I see someone go to a url they just type "facebook" and press enter which takes them to google and then the click the first link.

I would say mostly for cohesive brand recognition and marketing but for practical purposes no.

I am mostly just experimenting for now. The main thing was that I wanted to learn how to use Flask and deploy on Heroku.

At this point, I am seeing what will get users on the site. I'm wondering if it might be better as a phone app for brainstorming names.

I was looking at checking for whether a .com is open or not. I timed a few techniques and it seems the best I can get is .02 seconds per check (in Python). That's fine for checking a couple names if they are open, but it slows down a lot if I try to do this for any sizable list. Maybe it's better to have a click-able checkbox for the user to indicate they want only free .com ones.

Nice, that book likes it will be really useful for what I am trying to do.

You are thinking to have like a button next to each next which can play do text to speech for that name? Or do you mean like a game to see if they can pronounce it properly?

I have been thinking if it's more like a game on the site it would help a lot to have someone revisit the site.

I feel like it is our responsibility to not promote ignorance. The world would be a better place if people didn't think Google was the internet.

A part of me dies when I see people do that, but at the same time, I'm glad they found something that works, so I keep my mouth shut. I just figure that using good, non-confusing, URLs is a good place to start. One step at a time.

I also want to be able to tell the 10% who actually do care. These people are more comfortable using the internet and may be more likely to buy the product you are selling, yeah? I have no data to back this up, but just a thought.

It sounds like you have a few ideas. First is the business idea but also a hashtag / meme generator, third is ???. Splitting it into subdomains or two different ideas isn't a bad idea.

Uber bought uber.com, AirBnB supposedly payed 1% equity for their domain. Owning the .com seems to be valued by some people.

Uber buying uber.com is super weird because isn't 99.9999% of their audience using an app? That they get by searching for "uber" in the app store? I mean I think they probably have it so that no one squats on it and makes an "uber sucks" page?

http://starbucked.com/index.html

For those not in the know, some guy took an ad out of New York Times to promote this site. For many years, it was the first search result for "starbucks."

Safe to say the site hasn't been updated in a while...

There's also the famous nissan.com I think that one's amazing. Hope he keeps up the good fight indefinitely.

I'd like there to be a generator of random poker screen names for those sites / networks that allow to change them frequently (Unibеt, Microgаming, Winamаx) The issue is that, in order for the name changes to disguise one's identity totally, they need to be in different styles, i.e. include birthdate-like numbers / poker terms / non-US toponyms / celebrity names (and word plays on them) / French words etc. with frequencies that are close to those that occur naturally in recreational online poker players.

I can provide a list of screen names that I've encountered at poker sites in reality if you're interested

Do you think other people would be interested in that as well? How often do you change your name there?

Currently, the site gets no traffic unless I try to promote it... the concept is not as useful as I thought it seems.

I was hoping people would use the site as a way to brain storm names for different projects or companies.

Well, a lot has changed since then, and I'm less likely to play at those sites now, though I'd change the name every couple of playing hours then, in order to throw others' HUDs off my trail. I've heard that players don't change screen names too often even when they're given an opportunity to do so every 1000 real money hands.

So such a project wouldn't be in demand.

I put "poker hand ranges"
3rd proposition was HandJobs

I have been experimenting with some linguistic patterns for product name generation.

http://www.nameamigo.com/patterns

This pattern follows Consonant-Vowel-Consonant-Vowel, which is supposed to create a rhythmic sounding name.

Also a Pokemon Name Generator:

http://www.nameamigo.com/pokemon