What's in a Name?

I’ve been watching my friend Mike Katz for awhile. I had already been on the internet with my own URL for a bit, and as my brother at the time was buying up URLs by the bushel (he even owned HowardStern.org for awhile), so I was quite curious what name and URL Mike would choose for his business. I know that a name is hard to come up with, and if you can pick a good one, in terms of the internet, it can really make or break a business (remember when they sold business.com for 5 million?).

He first came out of the blocks with the name RAE Internet. Not bad, I’d say, as it’s just three letters, and three letters, all combinations of any three letters, were getting quickly bought up by those folks known as cybersquatters.

But RAE is kind of awkward as well, as how the hell do you pronounce it? You remember that old commercial, you can call me Ray, you can call me Jay? But in this case it would be you can call me Ray, or you can call me Ra E, or you can call me Ree.

I mean, us Americans, we tend not to pile our vowels on top of each other like the French, as it can create some very funny pronunciations (I once new a French girl named Aurora, and I simply could not say the way she said her name, and as you can well imagine, the relationship didn’t last). But still, three letters is good, and if it worked for him, then no harm no foul.

But several years later, I saw that he’d changed his company name to Message Partners. A HA, now he gets it!!! For someone in the email security business, Message Partners is the perfect name. A name that’s relevant, easy to remember, and best of all, easy to say.

I guess the only real confusion with Message Partners is that Message looks so much like Massage. And I live myself in downtown New York, not so far from Chinatown, where there a dozens of Massage Parlors that give those famous happy endings. All I’ve got to say about Message Partners is that, if you do use us, our happy endings last a hell of a lot longer.