We wrote a script to come up with the Mozio.com domain name.
About a year and a half ago we started our coding of Mozio V 1.0 but we were without a name.
I had a google doc full of potential travel names. I had gone through the dictionary looked up every synonym for “voyage,” “travel,” “adventure,” and many more. I then appended various Web 2.0 sounding endings and looked to see if the domain name was available.
I had two rules:
1) When someone says the name you need to have a reasonable chance of being able to know how to spell it if you had never heard of it before. You shouldn’t have to spell out what your name was to make people understand.
2) The domain name should be available. Obviously. No “GoMozio.com” for a website that is named “Mozio.”
After a while I had gone through 200 different names and the domain name was never available.
So I figured perhaps I should attack it from the opposite direction. Maybe figure out every single domain name that was available and then figure out which ones were usable.
So I wrote a script.
It was a bit of a hack. Essentially I limited the domain search to domains that were 5 letters long. I hard coded in trendy sounding endings like “ly” and “io.” And I wrote simple rules that no two consonants could be next to each other, and that the second letter had to be a vowel. Once it came up with a potential domain name it automatically checked the WHOIS database to see if it had already been registered.
I let it run for 5-6 hours and then came back to look at my results.
Peppered in with all the “xyzio.com” results were several names that actually made sense.
I deleted all the ones that didn’t make sense and started thinking if anyone of the ones remaining sounded like anything remotely travel or transportation related.
Mozio sounded like “to mosey on over,” and it sounded like a name you could build a brand around, so that’s how we settled on that.
David Litwak 