I grew up in New York City. My first job out of school was as an urban planner. When my wife and I (and kid) moved from San Francisco to the peninsula further south, my requirement was walking distance to a downtown area. I am a big fan of the urban and town spaces.

While the towns along the San Francisco Peninsula (e.g. Burlingame, San Mateo, San Carlos, Menlo Park, and Palo Alto) are pretty great for shopping, eating and socializing, they are terrible for a growing business.

Biz360, where I am founder and chairman, started in downtown Redwood City. That downtown turned to be too quiet (barren) for my tastes so we moved to downtown San Mateo. Everyone at Biz360 loved it. We had all sorts of lunch options, coffee options, shopping options and park options. Our location was feasible for employees from San Francisco to San Jose to the East Bay.  The office we had was pretty poor “B” space and parking was a pain and not free, but when I did a survey of the employees, they were more than willing to make the tradeoffs.

It was pretty clear, however, that when we started to grow beyond 25 people, we would have to move out of San Mateo and into the only place on the SF Peninsula that can handle growing businesses: the office park. That’s just too bad. Besides the obvious spike in lost time and the waste of more traffic (to/from lunch, to/from chores), I think an office park gives a workplace a sad, isolated feeling. I find this to be true of almost all office parks, whether it is the current Biz360 offices, the Googleplex or Yahoo-ville.

Redwood City has an opportunity to solve this problem as it is revitalizing its downtown, which is quite large and has lots of infill areas to create a vibrant social downtown that can support the growing tech business. 

The plan calls for accommodating “small-scale office buildings (5,000 to 10,000 square feet)” and while that helps a company up to about 50 employees, growing to any larger than that gives us the choice of the office park (or tough Bay Area commutes to the cities of San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland).

It’s a shame.

So far, naming the company was one of the hardest things we did.

I enjoy the process very much. I’ve done it before. I’ve read a pretty good book (Wordcraft, by Alex Frankel); I’ve thought hard about them.

For tech companies, the big problem is, of course, URL availability and it is an extreme limiting factor to naming. The naturally limited inventory and the squatters forces unnatural names. (If you are lucky and the URL for your preferred name is not taken, then it is likely that the trademark is open as well, but you can do a quick check on that).  Venture capitalist Fred Wilson has a post about domain name extensions that is worth reading.  Since my blog is named Seedround, I will disagree with his statement that a name is worth $25,000.

So what is the creative process for finding a name? Don’t really have one, sorry. This is one of those “lightning can strike anywhere” projects.

Dan and I named Milktruck while he was keeping me company while I was waiting for a train. I forgot how we can up with Biz360 (but that was a codename that stuck; or more accurately, nothing better was ever suggested). Boxxet was thought of late one night (while I was alone) after weeks and weeks going through hundreds of names. I had to force myself to walk away from the project several times just to regain energy.

There’s no magic for me; lots of ideas (some awful, some great but unavailable, some good); lots of research; then a bit of testing with your inner circle (after all, why share bizarre names with too many people?).

• Can they say it?
• Can they spell it?
• Are they going to, more likely than not, remember it?

Yes to all? Wow! Two of three? Take it.

Does it pass the ridiculous test? Then go. Of course, you can also not pass the ridiculous test and still do very well (see Yahoo and Google).

There will be people who love/hate/like/dislike/don’t care about your name. You will not get agreement; you should not bother to get agreement.

I happen to like names that are descriptive or provoke the images I would like the company’s users/clients to see:

• Milktruck: This was a “push” Web application. So Milktruck automatically brought you fresh stuff every day!
• Biz360: This was an analytic application that analyzed all the news that happened around your company and industry everyday. Biz360 gave you a 360 degree view of your business.
• Boxxet: The image of the “best-of” is reflected in a “box set,” thus the name Boxxet. People who do not like the name right away will often come back and tell me that they later changed their mind.

We went through a LOT of names before we hit Boxxet. Many were awful. Here are some (no snickering, please): Onrego, civicjam, thelotofus, LoveOrHateIt, TheWordFor, REcolon, InRegardTo, ThisIsSwell, RiffWire. I’ll leave it to you to figure them out (at one point or another, they all had some meaning to me).

You may ask: why not go through a naming firm for such an important branding move?  To that, I point to this article that I first saw on Guy Kawasaki’s blog.

A small boom of terrific social applications has appeared in the last few years (and there are more are on the way). I find social applications very interesting because they bring personality to a web service. Compared to completely automated systems, social applications reflect the appealing human qualities of passion, perspective and nuance. These attributes can give social applications have a real leg up on completely automated systems.

However, the web community will have a tough time supporting the large entries of social applications. There is simply not enough participants/participation (or attention) to go around. New services that are essentially empty applications that require participants to add content and value will have a harder and harder time. We should expect to see a handful of such services dominate eBay style (where the network effect works its awesome magic). But unless these services can create lock-in the way eBay did with its feedback score, we have seen the fickleness of the crowds also abandon services just as quickly.

So many social applications will have to introduce methods that allow it to exist and thrive with less and less participation. Perhaps this is focusing on narrower niches, using only automation, or using a bionic system.

What is a bionic system?

Bionics is the study of living systems with the intention of applying their principles to the design of engineering systems. So a bionic system would be an “engineering” system that has the principles of living systems. Some examples of bionic systems:

• recommendation systems through collaborative filtering, which have been around for years, take the personal preferences of many individuals in a group and use them to find new recommendations to the single individual,
• link analysis systems (such as Google’s PageRank, Memeorandum, and Technorati) takes the link information on web pages to uncover relevant or popular content,
• photo-recognition systems, such as Riya, which has machines that takes a few human identifications of a face and then uses that information to identify many others. In an interesting bionic system that goes the other way, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has used humans to tell computers where stores are located in a photo (computers can do wonders with just a little bit of a repeating pattern, but if there is no pattern; it falls apart).
• sentiment analysis: at Biz360 (where I am founder and Chairman), we built a Point-of-View Sentiment engine where we automatically rated news stories and blogs stories as positive, neutral or negative from our client’s point-of-view. Humans rate dozens of articles and the machine learns and rates thousands, even tens of thousands, of articles.
• Content filtering and preference: at Boxxet (where I am founder and CEO), we are working to employ a bionic system to capture a small number of ratings and submissions and amplify it to sort and filter the best content on many subjects, even subjects that may have only a very small community.

In all these cases, the impact of human participation is significantly amplified by the machine. There are downsides to bionic systems; errors can be amplified and machines can make head-scratching decisions (we have all laughed at off-base recommendations). But the upsides are clear: the passion, perspective, nuance and wisdoms of crowds, even a small crowd, is captured and used far beyond the individual contribution. Bionic systems also help cushion the downside of fickleness, fluctuation and distraction—other qualities of the crowd. These benefits will help social applications extend its usefulness and longevity.

Note: I will be talking more about bionic systems Wed, March 8 at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. See you there. Also expect to see deeper thoughts on bionic systems in the upcoming weeks and months.