My sister gave me a book called The Art of Start by Guy Kawasaki for Christmas. It is a wonderful book with a long line of tips for anyone about to start a business.

Morpheus
A section that immediately caught my eye while I browsed the book is entitled "Take the Red Pill". This is a reference to the scene in the film The Matrix where Neo meets Morpheus and gets the option to see things the way they really are. What Kawasaki suggests is that when you start a business you need a Morpheus. That person will tell you the realities of life; what makes you competitor's products superior to yours, what a realistic income is, when you are really going to be ready for market, what is wrong with your product, etc.

Mexicrus
Another section I loved was about names because I have wanted to change our company name since October. About 3 years ago, Michael and I had some ideas for small shareware tools that we wanted to develop after hours. Somehow it made sense that if we had the infrastructure to publish small applications, we would also do it. For several reasons we did not have the required time to do this properly, but we did get around to register mexircus.com. The vision was to sell a small line of simple shareware tools; A shareware application zoo. Since circuses are more exciting than zoos it became; A mechanical circus -- Mexircus. Not long after registering, I felt that it was a hopeless name.

The tipping point came when my sister began to push for a name change. She told me that whenever she showed one of my applications to a friend, they associated Mexircus with Mexico. I like Mexico. It is a wonderful country with plenty of both old and new culture. Sure they have a drug war, but it was a truly wonderful experience to be a tourist there. Unfortunately, according to my sister the majority of the American public associates Mexico with cheap labour. I don't know if that is true, but I know I wanted to change the name.

Naming tips

Kawasaki lists a number of naming tips:

• Have a first initial that's early in the alphabet
• Avoid numbers
• Pick a name with "Verb potential"
• Sound different (distinguishable)
• Sound logical
• Avoid the trendy

Michael and I have had a long line of discussions about names. Whenever we suggested names to each other one of three things would happen:

1. One of us would not like the name
2. We would both not like the name after 2 minutes.
3. The name would already have be taken (as in xyz.com or similar).

Amazingly, I think number 3 occurred more than 1 and 2 put together.

Vivid Apps
By mid-February I was tired of this exercise and discovered by accident that vividapps.com was not taken. I did a quick google search on Vivid Apps and decided that it was a good name. Vivid as in "lively" and "vivid imagination". Michael must have been tired of the discussion too, because he didn't really resist.

So I wrote to Apple. It took a while to find a suitable email address at Apple where I could ask for a name change and it turned out that the one I picked was the wrong one. However, they replied that I had to write to iTunesConnect@apple.com and include - name of the App (s), versions, SKUs, and Apple ID (s). It did not cost anything. The name changing process took a few days on the app store (I don't know why), so for a while we were called Mexircus but would only show up if you searched for "vivid apps". Otherwise, the whole process was quite smooth.

Whoops
I don't really have a Morpheus, but I have a friend that could easily become one. This week Allan Odgaard wrote to me about the update for NotifyMe; he had several comments and suggestions that immediately made me feel very tired, but the changes he suggested will improve the application a lot. He also had a comment about the company name. It turns out that there is a porn company called Vivid Entertainment who is registered at vivid.com. You would think that I checked this, right? For some reason I did not. I googled "Vivid apps", "Vivid software", "Vivid tech" and several others, but never just plain "Vivid".

So not only did I completely ignore Kawasaki's list of tips, but now we are also sharing first name with a porn company. Are we going to change it? Not for a while, I think. At this point we can decide to be associated with cheap labour or porn. I did not know vivid.com, neither did Michael, and neither did several other people I know, so there is a chance that not everybody will associate us with porn. There is also the chance that those who do know vivid.com will have a casual feeling about porn and not mind the name. Perhaps, they might even notice it more, and the app store is all about getting noticed. Finally, it took us forever to decide on this name, and I have no idea how we can come up with a new one.

Of course, if I had talked with my Morpheus -- Allan -- before the name change we would probably not have chosen Vivid Apps. By the way, Allan is author of the award winning text-editor Textmate, but don't go to textmate.com if you are looking for it. For now I hope no one writes vivid.com when they are looking for us.