Company names:
RIVERBED
Services Provided:
Image consulting, brand analysis, brand strategy, company naming, product naming, corporate identity, creative direction, advertising, graphic design, copywriting, website design, video production
 When we started working with NBT Technology in May, 2003, it was four guys in a room on Bryant Street in San Francisco. The last time I looked, their market cap was $2.5 billion. NBT stood for, believe it or not, Next Best Thing. They knew they had to do better than that. Spearheaded by a former Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, they had a brilliant idea and they were really nice guys to boot. But getting across what they did was complicated. After the third naming session, it wasn’t happening so we came back to the idea that two of them were fly fisherman. So we started thinking about water. And how rivers are the pathways of civilization. And Riverbed was born. They were happy. We were happy. When you allow the personal side to spill over into the corporate side, it often releases a tremendous amount of energy. But it has to be done carefully. Over the next four years, we developed everything from their corporate identity to ad campaigns to online lead generation to trade show exhibits to an animation that finally nailed down what they did in a way that was fun.
STOKE
Services Provided:
Image consulting, brand analysis, brand strategy, company naming, product naming, corporate identity, creative direction, graphic design, copywriting, website design, video production
 Randall Kruep is a cowboy from Breeze, Illinois. We met him at the rooftop café at the Art Institute of San Francisco. He had a bundle of money from two big venture firms and was starting a company to tackle a giant problem in the telco space--how to connect the silos that run land telephones, cell phones and internet phones so a user can seamlessly roam between systems using the cheapest one available. The name of the company was Network Vanguard. The founders saw themselves as a “group of people who got tired of just going to work with people or causes we no longer believed in any more. These were stale companies that had lost their leadership or their focus or mission in life. Virtual death. Open ended coffins. They had no soul.” A number of silicon valley rock stars came out of retirement to join the party and we got to know them pretty well. Over a period of three years, A Hundred Monkeys renamed the company, designed the identity, designed and wrote two generations of the website, completed a series of videos and executed all the marketing materials. The name Stoke is a surfing term. “To catch a wave was (and is) to stoke the fires of the heart and soul. Hence the terms: to be stoked, the stoked life, degrees of stoke, and pure stoke.” (John Grissam, Pure Stoke, 1982).
Broad Daylight
Services Provided:
Image consulting, brand analysis, brand strategy, company naming
 A
company called Acme Software came to us with an interesting naming assignment.
They did expert Q & A on the web, helping to answer customers' and
employees questions with a very sophisticated database constantly fed
by a panel of experts. They had picked Acme partly because Wile E. Coyote
used Acme Roadrunner Spray in Looney Tunes. They loved the connection,
but they were afraid that people wouldn't take them seriously. There were
half a dozen people on the naming committee, including the CEO, Louise
Kirkbride. We had a great time with them, looked seriously at about 75
names, and finally picked Broad Daylight because it felt a little brazen
and spoke directly to what they did, which was to shed light on people's
questions.
Cruel World
Services Provided:
Image consulting, brand analysis, brand strategy, company naming
 We
were brought into this one by Millie Olson, the CEO of San Francisco ad
agency Amazon
Advertising, which is a funny story in itself. She decided to call
her agency Amazon before Jeff Bezos moved to Seattle and she was thinking
of the heroic women, not the river. They have courageously kept their
name even though they have a lot of explaining to do. Their client was
called Career Central and they worked with graduates of top business schools
to pick up where the schools' placement offices left off. Monster.com
was just taking off and CEO Jeff Hyman wanted a name that would get peoples'
attention and speak to his young professional audience. Despite the fact
that one of his board members threatened to quit if we went ahead, he
picked Cruel World and the man got the edge he wanted.
Atomica
Services Provided:
Image consulting, brand analysis, brand strategy, company naming, corporate identity
 We were approached by Bob Rosenschein, an Israeli software developer who had been working on
a pretty amazing product called Gurunet
that allowed a PC user to click on any word in a document and get a lot
of relevant, useful information almost instantly. Bob had started out
with a product that used this technique to click on any word and see it
in a bunch of foreign languages. When he showed the idea to Yossi Vardi,
the man who sold ICQ to AOL, Vardi said, "This is not translation
software, this is more like a very focused search engine." Bob took
his advice, and morphed the program so that it could transform almost
any word on your screen into searchable hypertext. But the name Gurunet
became unworkable because in the U.S., where he wanted to market it, there
was a very active company called Guru.com. So he was Gurunet.com, a confusing
mouthful. We decided to come up with a name that would capture the almost
superhuman quality of what they were doing. We wanted a comic book hero
kind of name and that is how we settled on Atomica.
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