What's in a name?
Posted by D D Ganguly on Thu, Jul 12, 2007 @ 10:53 AM
Our company's name always evokes a comment. Some like it. Others think it's whimsical. And we frequently get questions - So how did you come up with the name? What does Dimdim stand for? Sometimes we put on a serious face and say, "Dimdim stands for Distributed Immersive Meetings. One Dim for you and the other one for me." Some people even believe that story. Here's the real story.
We sat down with 18,000 domain names and promised ourselves that we would not leave without naming our company. We set 5 simple rules:
- The dotcom domain name must be available
- The name must have high recall
- The name must be international
- The sound of the name must translate without ambiguity to its spelling
- The spelling must translate to unambiguously to its pronunciation
Five hours later we named the company Dimdim.
Some folks have started assuming that my initials (DD) stand from Dimdim and call me Dimdim Ganguly. And I feel rather embarrassed when some people think that the company was named after my initials.