It’s never easy to come up with a good meaningful name for a new company, especially if it’s a tech company. The reason is that if you are a tech company, you will most definitely need to register a .com domain. Nowadays this is not an easy task to find a compact domain that had not been already registered or purchased by a domain resellers or as I call them “domain hoggers.”

So, coming up with the name “Liforia” has been a journey. Before “Liforia.com,” our metaphysical social network had a code name “MyLifeInteractive.com.” This code name persisted for a while, until we realized that regardless of how much we wanted this name to stick, people just can not remember it, let alone say it in one breath. It was more like a sentence. “MyLifeInteractive” was quite a mouthful, yet it persisted simply because we could not find a better alternative.

When it came to the logo design, even the graphic designers we approached were very resistant to the name “MyLifeInteractive.” Some of them refused to even work with that name. Finally, we found a very talented graphic artist whose logo work was very thoughtful and innovative. So, we thought he would be able to tackle the task. When he heard the name, even he was puzzled. Eventually, he convinced us to change the name. I am glad we did.

That is when we decided to start looking for a more Web 2.0 name. You know, something along the lines of “miggly”, “shmiggly”, “boogly”, “koogly” dot com. Yet, we did not want to settle for a meaningless funky name that was available. We really wanted the name to carry the essence of our social networking application. We were pretty perplexed, almost to the point of despair.

In the end, after 2 months of brainstorming, the name “Liforia” came to us by “coincidence” - well, we say “there is no coincidence.” Our goal was to have a name that would:

1. sound ancient or be based on an ancient language like Greek or Latin,
2. be short enough to be easily remembered,
3. be easily pronounced, and
4. most importantly, it should be available for domain registration.

We realized that the harder we THINK about the name, the least likely we would come up with one. We believed it should come to us effortlessly and should just click with both of us. We figured using mind would not help us and that we needed to allow the Universe or our intuition deliver the name in a synchronistic manner.

We decided to randomly generate names until one of them would click with both of us. We used domain generating sites, among which was these ones - “Web 2.0 Company Name Generator” ( www.lightsphere.com/dev/web20.html) and Dotomator.com. The latter one allowed to enter prefixes and suffixes and randomly generate words.

John worked with the prefixes, generating words based on a certain prefix. And I worked in a similar fashion, but using suffixes. I started making lists of latin suffixes like (-ality, -icus, -us, -ium, etc.) Among all these suffixes, for some reason, at the top of my page, I wrote down “-oria,” thinking like Astoria, Memoria, Istoria, etc. And John was working with the word “Life” as a prefix, and all of its translations in various languages “Vida-”,”Vie-”, “Leben-”, “Vita-”, etc.

After the whole day of randomly generating hundreds of words, we realized once again that we were pushing it too hard. So, we decide to “close shop” for the day. It was a Thursday evening and we were ready to wrap it up.

In the last attempt, or just for the hell of it , I glanced at John’s and my notes, which were lying next to each other on the desk. At the very top of our lists, were the words “LIFE” on John’s and “ORIA” on mine, respectively . So for joke’s sake, I just said it out loud “LIFE-ORIA.” To which John replied, “That’s not bad at all. In fact, it sounds kinda good.” I said “Really? Well, this was at the top of our pages all along. It’s like ‘Life + Euphoria.’”

After repeating it maybe 20 times out loud, we both agreed that the name was PERFECT. We were so excited about this name that we decided to run it by a couple of psychics that we knew. We liked the name so much that even if the psychics didn’t like the name, we would still use it, as it worked so well. It represents the purpose of our social networking site - a positive awareness of our lives.

Moreover, the domain was available for just $5.99, which beats some of the other domain names with which we had come up and which were sold by “domain hogs” for $1,500. We immediately registered it and all of its possible misspellings.