Bloomberg BusinessWeek – The Twitter Effect, The Struggle to create the perfectly weird company name

“Perfecting a name in the Digital Age, according to Tungsten’s Davis, is both art and science. His most famous invention is PODS, short for Portable On-Demand Storage. The moving and storage company’s original name was Portables, but Davis thought it “sounded too much like a toilet.” A name like PODS, he says, creates a feeling of “what, tell me more” instead of “huh, I don’t get it.

The biggest mistake among amateur name creators, Davis believes, is overanalyzing the language.

Amateurs can become too focused on the linguistics and the number of vowels and consonants. “They’re so grammatically focused that they miss the bigger picture,” he says. “They forget that there’s got to be a story connected to it. Other people get the story, but the word is so clunky that nobody cares about the story. They’ll be like, ‘In Latin, this word means the god of business.’ Well, yeah, but it’s got 16 syllables and five x’s and three z’s.”