Category: In the News

Last month, the Libyan government seized control of the website vb.ly, a link shortening service geared toward adults. Libyan authorities explained the site was shut down for offensive imagery and promoting adult content on the website. This begs the question: do other countries with popular ccTLDs (.tv, .cc, .co) claim to have the final say over what websites can and cannot exist?

Y Combinator’s Demo Day started as a chance for recent college graduates to present their work, but now looking back on the eleventh annual event it is clear they are now including entrepreneurs with experience. Growing in size and popularity every year, Demo Day has become not only a place to get word out about your business, but to also hook up with angel investors. From the large list of presenters the ones that caught my eye were the businesses with names that have brand potential, creativity, or memorability - both good and bad.

Y Combinator's annual Demo Day always features interesting new products and services. This latest Demo Day, the eleventh one, was the biggest yet and seems to have had a higher level of experienced founders presenting. I wanted to share my opinion on some of the most memorable startup brand names at the event, both good and bad.

Photo by: Jared Tarbell

There are clear benefits to snatching up the perfect keyword domain name. It is nice to have a domain that explains what your start up does. However, as the hope of any business is to expand and grow - picking a specific keyword domain can put your business in a box that is hard to climb out of. Thus stunting your business growth by forcing you to rebrand or spend marketing efforts on redefining what your business does under your original keyword name.

Insurance giant AIG is looking to dump its tarnished brand. This past month during the House Financial Services hearing on AIG, CEO Edward Liddy revealed that while the company's healthy businesses would survive, its name probably wouldn't.

"I think the AIG name is so thoroughly wounded and disgraced that we're probably going to have to change it," he said.