‘Round the corner: Not quite “hand made,” but the process sounds all natural. Still, it’s gotta’ be tough for these folks to sell a lot of fudge But oh those chunky brownies….can’t you almost just smell them?

Abra Cadabra: Naming a company is not like pulling a rabbit out of a hat — but there is a kind of magic to it.

Looking back, we’re taking a magical mystery tour of Internet company names, thanks to Google’s 20 year Usenet Timeline. It’s DejaNews all over again.

Our trip though the jungle of Internet Company names begins with a Usenet message from some guy named Jeff Bezos, who was hiring for an unknown startup back in the summer of 1994. Nobody knew then that, only five years later, he’d be Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. He was just some clever kid fresh out of school (okay, Princeton) with an idea he could make history on the internet with a company he called Cadabra Inc.

“What do you call your company?” the VC lawyer asked.

“Cadabra, like abracadabra, only shorter,” said the young man.

“Sounds like cadaver,” said the lawyer, who’d seen a lot of startups die, for want of a better word, “You’d better change the name.”

Amazon…dot com, yeah, that’s it. He could be, like, King of Amazon. With some magic omen, the signature on his Usenet message a few weeks earlier had been a quotation of Xerox PARC’s Alan Kay, “It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.”

The rest is history. I mean, what became of that Cadabra name? Two other geeky students had created their own online search tool. Soon, they were in Silicon Valley Business Journal.

While students at Stanford University, Narinder Singh and Don Geddis set up an online service that allowed users to search for rental housing by inputting criteria such as the number of bedrooms, location and price range. The site, search.tesserae.com, includes classified advertisements culled from newspapers throughout the Bay Area. It was the first search engine of its kind and is still available for use.

In 1997, after graduating from Stanford, Messrs. Singh and Geddis developed similar technology that enabled users to search online for real estate. They decided to license the technology and named their company Tesserae after the square tiles Romans used to make mosaics because the firm was the first to “glue together applications” to enable people to search different databases, from different Internet sites, simultaneously….

By 1999, they had convinced everyone that needed convincing: Tesserae would reinvent itself as an online search engine and would no longer license its technology to other companies. The company changed its name to the catchier Cadabra and changed its product from housing to another hot item in the valley: computer and electronic equipment.

“The name is like Yahoo or Excite,” Mr. Singh said. “You’ve got to have an easy to understand brand.”

Like, Yahoo! It wasn’t long before Cadabra got bought by GoTo.com, an IdeaLab company that made a name for itself when it sued Go.com into a lucrative infringement settlement that virtually shut down the Disney portal. Go figger.

And then all of a sudden it was so not cool for a big company that needed money to be a dotcom, and it became necessary for GoTo.com to come up with a new name for itself. Overture, the name was “conceived internally” according to the press release pdf announcing the new name.

Overture was chosen based on its ability to communicate the company’s compelling advertiser and affiliate partner benefits. One definition of “overture” is an introduction, making the name a metaphor for the targeted introductions the company facilitates….

To make a long story short, Overture acquired some more big names in search like Fast, and the progenitor of search engines, AltaVista, in some cases for less than their domain names once sold for. And then, Overture itself was acquired. Yahoo!

By the way, cadabra.com is for sale for $5,000 now, if anyone wants a name with a story. Bezos? Jeff Bezos? Anyone?

Originally posted by Abnu on our sister-site, Wordlab.

Of Academic Placenta and Triorites: If you haven’t checked out the Silicon Valley Slang website, you’re missing a big opportunity. And don’t be dissuaded by the site’s opening joke: “Under Development – please try again in a few days!” It’s fully functional and full of insider insults that you can hurl at the fascist pin-benders that run your own IT department. Or at least you’ll be able to understand the coded insults that they are muttering at you.

Either way it’s a nice break from the hell that is your job.

Corporate Darwinism: Our esteemed competitors at Brand Evolution have changed their name. We are, for once, speechless. Please help us decipher this one. Check it out.

Dim Sum: i-Newswire.com brings us an interesting press release:

The Brand Name Awards for 2004, known affectionately as The Brandies, invites all interested parties to nominate names for a Name Award for 2004 by visiting www.BrandNameAwards.com. Anyone can enter a name online, and have a chance to win their own copy of the award trophy — a beautiful brandy snifter glass engraved with a branding iron. For this inaugural event, names will be judged in the categories of Best New Business Name, Best New Product Name, Best Name Change and Best Sole Proprietorship. Only names that came to prominence in 2004 are eligible for submission. The winning names will be selected by an eminent panel of judges representing naming agencies, branding agencies, marketing professionals, academia, promo companies, sponsors and all the related media sources. Separate awards will be given in each category for different industries so that a name in business, say, does not have to compete against a consumer name in pharmaceuticals or some other unrelated arena.

…The Brand Name Awards are organized and sponsored by Brighter Naming, home of the Name Critic. They are Silicon Valley’s full service independent naming agency, providing names for all sizes of companies, products, services and other agencies worldwide.

The irony of Brighter Naming producing and judging naming awards is of course manifest in the names that occupy their own portfolio, which include such delicacies as:

Metalum, Diagenes,Swanora, Imbala, Zonare,Netrova,Concuity,Epizon,Vothe, Ultrada,Synetics, Cataligent, Empriva, Immersant, Intira, Acterra, and Telispire.

A complete listing of Brighter Naming transgressions can be viewed here. Nominate your favorite today!

Norak Biosciences lays claim to the first name change born in the new year, changing their name to Xsira Pharmaceuticals. What does Xsira mean? They don’t say in their press release. It’s possible that the X is meant to connote “extreme”, as in the naming strategy behind X-games or Xbox. “Sira” is a tome on the life of the Prophet Mohammed by the father of Arabian history, Ibn Izaak, penned back in the 9th century.

Another name change with religious overtones of a different faith is a bizarre double play. Baseball’s Anaheim Angels have renamed themselves “The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim,” which when translated from Spanish means “The The Angels Angels of Anaheim.” Only in La La Land.