One more small step along the road of my business venture, the documents have been signed to establish the corporate entity: Enlark, LLC. No mission statement and I'm still not ready to disclose the first product planned for Enlark. There is an alpha (trademark) logo for the company that I've been using on internal presentations. So maybe I'll give a little background on the source of the company's name and that'll give something of a very general view of the company. I'll talk about other aspects of this baby business venture as other pieces start to fall together. What follows in this post will be personal opinion and shall not constitute official policy of the company. [1]
From whence the name? I have a weird techno-linquistic background, so bear with my jargon. My goals in choosing the name were 1) originality, 2) brevity, 3) available in the .com TLD, which today is just about the source for globally checking the openness of a name. I wanted something pronounceable without "training" (for example, "flickr" is cute but highly confusing on first introduction) and also easy to spell should someone only hear the name in the "real world" and wish to find the website. The easy way to satisfy the three goals are to use a neologism, or "made up word", particularly because the .com domains for almost every word in the average sized English dictionary has already been purchased (as well as most common misspellings and two word combos and baby/pet/nicknames...).
Enlark is an unlikely, but valid, construction following English morphology, coming from the still productive en- prefix (found in words like entrust, endear, enthusiasm, energy, and embiggens), of latin/greek origin via french, and the English verb lark as in to play, of germanic origin via birds. Thus "enlark" might be a perfectly valid word meaning "to make/cause play" or "to play in/on". This, I think is something of an fun and acceptable gambit for me to play. I've already established it's an easy to use psuedo-English verb. I could certainly have a hard time enforcing it as a "strong" trademark (something like Maytag where the trademark is all that name is used for). But I'm fine with good "weak" trademarks if the word itself becomes a household name. (...again, not the official policy of the company, just my opinion.) Basically I chose a verb as something of a challenge to the English-speaking world: I know my brand is a success if I can open the Merriam-Webster and/or Oxford dictionaries and find that "enlark" is the common word for "to play a game online" or maybe "to play an awesome immersive experience", even if the company can't still "own" that word alone...
I certainly don't expect to be a household name overnight, though. At least at first I'm also not really going to be selling Enlark as a brand, I think the products come first. More on that when I feel ready to start talking about it...
| [1] | Feels good to write that. Time to do at least a little revelry in formalism. |