I suck at naming things. I named my first company “Feld Technologies” (yeah, that was super creative, but I bet it made my dad proud.) I learned an important lesson from that one – when things go wrong people call for Mr. Feld and yell at him. Better to name your company Costolo Technologies if your last name is Feld.
I then went on to name another company I co-founded – this one that was one of the first email service providers (in the mid-1990’s we referred to this as “publishing email”). Guess what we named it? If you guessed “Email Publishing” you are now demonstrating your strong deductive reasoning skills as they pertain to my completely lame naming skills.
At some point, I took myself out of consideration for naming things. I take no responsibility for any company names after 1997.
A year ago I learned that the “tech scene” in Colorado was referred to as “ICT” or “Information and Communication Technologies”. This happened during my activity with the Colorado Governors Innovation Council while we were trying to convince people (successfully) that the software / Internet industry is a key part of the economic activity in Colorado. A side note: we succeeded – as Governor Ritter has recently stated ICT is now the fifth pillar of economic development in Colorado, joining bio, aerospace, tourism, and the new energy economy.
As part of this, I discovered that ICT is a popular TLA in government for referring to software + Internet + communications. Fortunately, very few people outside of government (except for the government affairs people at tech companies) use the phrase ICT or even know what it means. I commented several times (especially after endlessly referring to it as CIT) that it was a terrible name. When asked what I’d call this sector, I responded with “I suck at naming things.” Kettle – pot – black.
Some of my friends have started talking about a better name for “the Colorado Tech Scene”. After encouraging them to please please please not use the word “Silicon” in the phrase, I proceeded to bow out of any real discussions about this as “I suck at naming things.” Recently a group of them got serious about figuring out a name and the guys at Rocky Radar agreed to take the lead on crowd sourcing suggestions.
So – if you have any ideas, send an email to nameCO@rockyradar.com or tweet it with the hash code #nameCO. Help us replace ICT with something other than CIT.