What’s in a name?
The name EdgeCloud, was pieced together by Nathan and I on a Sunday evening a little over two months ago (you can see that from a quick whois check). After racking our brains for what seemed like an eternity the eureka moment of EdgeCloud made itself known to us. I believe Nathan actually enjoys the honor of speaking the name first - it stuck with the both of us though, even after deciding to sleep on it for a night.
Cybersquatters don’t make things easy for those trying to “earn an honest domain.” Every conceivable (and not so conceivable) combination of wording in the english language is shrouded by a page that retorts that the domain can be had for “$888″ and given our modest beginnings we simply mumbled a few choice words and moved on.
The name is important enough that even after number of such squatters’ pages we continued on, braving the new world ruled by these creative-spark-killers. We poured over numerous books and wikipedia entries, looking for keywords, ideas and practices that we could use to generate new names. I had picked up nameboy (since that seemed to work out for my previous gig “Axiomfire”, which I always thought was a cool name) and started using it repeatedly to sift through combinations. The only other word that stood out to us was Axon but even that was problematic and there were already hundreds of domains with that name taken. Additionally, we wanted to avoid using suffixes like “systems”, “technologies” or “enterprises.” We wanted a single name that said it all, was less than three syllables and didn’t use any extra suffix modifiers.
And EdgeCloud was it. Nathan and I concluded adamantly that it was probably taken but a cursory check concluded that it was still available. But we didn’t grab it at that moment. We slept on it and in the morning after still liking it, we purchased the major TLD versions of the name.
Visually, I think the name is striking. It evokes so many different thoughts and gives so many soft, subtle, yet distinct sets of imagery. Luckily, we were able to find a font to match that sensation from House Industries. If you are ever in need of a font - or design inspiration, then head on over to their site. These guys are kick-ass. (Perhaps more later on the massive, hard-bound, nicely-printed book received with said font package purchase).
Rendered font and all, we forged ahead. I made some minor modifications to give a “cloud” illustration to the logo name area itself. It went through many revisions to get to where it’s at today. I’ve never felt it was complete, but I do feel it’s currently in a reasonable and comfortable place for doing business.
So what is an EdgeCloud? A Google search seems to indicate something along the lines of a star nursery here in the Milky Way (EdgeCloud2). Regardless of any explicit definition I certainly feel that the name provides us with a very strong branding opportunity and I hope we’ll be able to leverage that here in the coming months. It’s interesting to see how strong the desire has been to identify the business even from conception. Even more telling was the compulsion to say that something as simple as “Great Web Applications, Inc.” just wouldn’t do. No, No. It’s about creativity, passion, discipline and intelligence. It’s about “rigid flexibility” and understanding where you fit in the grand scheme of things (either personally or in your market). And it’s definitely about providing a brand that evokes a positive response or emotion whenever it is seen or heard.
What’s in a name? Everything…