The tech boom gave the naming industry a boost by introducing a new stream of tech-words: Google got its name from the mathematical term for ten to the power of 100 (a googol) and Tesla from a unit for measuring the density of a magnetic flux. But it is also responsible for a lot of tripe. Too many tech companies are either tediously wacky (Yahoo) or overly familiar (PayPal). Tech firms are as plagued by naming-imitation as by product-imitation: witness the fashion for incorporating “Buzz” in your name (after BuzzFeed) or the “-ify” suffix (after Spotify).
