How to Choose a Company Name? Ask Google!
An entrepenuer, working on an RV / Mobile Home rental business, writes:
"At first I was set on naming it Recreationist, but the more I thought about it, the more irrational it seemed to choose a domain based on my own preferences. While I had a good feeling about Recreationist, I’m fundamentally skeptical of my own and everyone else’s intuition"
So he went ahead and tested 17 names by creating identical Google Adwords campaigns for each name.
"The winner, by a landslide, was rvmenu.com"
It had a much higher click through rate than the other names, suggesting that it can be an overall better domain name / business name (especially if online advertising will be a key customer acquisition tool).
P.S. Panabee and LeanDomainSearch are great for coming up with new (and available) domain name ideas.
For Inspiration: Uncover Invisible Motion in Video
Here's one of those simple ideas that can yield incredibly useful results.
Take a video of something (like a baby sleeping), take notice of the tiny little changes that are barely visible (to the human eye), and amplify those changes.
WOW - a stunning visualization technique that could enable a person to see things with the naked eye that were previously invisible.
This NYTimes article (and must-see video) is incredible and inspiring.
We've seen the technique used by Philips Medical in their iPhone app: by taking a short video of your face (or someone elses of course), it can detect the heart rate.
Imagine this used with Google Glass when playing poker (what would an elevated heart rate reveal!?)
User Interface Designers: Create Crude Prototypes in 15 Minutes
PopApp is a really simple tool, for iPhone and Android, that lets you:
- Draw-out your idea for an app
- Take photos of those drawings, and
- Stitch them together.
The result is a crude prototype and lets you see and feel how your app might look and work.
We use it often (with final screens that our mobile designer has created in Photoshop) in user testing: before we write a single line of code, get a sense of how users might interact with the app, what they might find confusing, etc.