Teeniz, the social game that gets children learning English in a fun way, is changing its name. The artist formerly known as Teeniz is now… Babble Planet!
The name chosen for a startup is quite important. It’s the first thing that anyone sees and the starting point of communication with the user or investor community. A kind of emotional and symbolic attachment is developed as well.
So when the time comes to change it, for various different reasons (the domain name’s already been bought by someone else, impossible to buy it off them, another site carrying a similar name might cause confusion…), this can create some problems : loss of original users, lack of recognition from potential investors who only remember the old name… “There’s a certain inertia from the users regarding a name, they sometimes find it difficult to change. Furthermore, the Web memorises all content generated by your app under it’s former name. Nevertheless, if the name change happens before the launch of the app or website, there’s no problem at all!”, comments Joan Burkovic, CEO of Bankin, formerly Perspecteev, a startup from Le Camping’s first season.
Nothing serious really in this case because the Beta version of Babble Planet has only just come out and the game had not yet made its mark on the market. But why exactly did they change their name? We asked to Elsa Prieto, CEO and developer of Babble Planet.
“We really didn’t have the choice, the name had to go”
When we decided on the name Teeniz, we were still in school. Teeniz.com was not available then but it was only a standard domain parking website and we didn’t imagine that that would stand in our way. Being initiates into the sisterhood of Murphy’s Law, however, it was when we wanted to create our startup around this project that this particular .com became a domain parking website unfortunately containing links to porn sites.
How did you go about finding the new name?
As we don’t have an enormous budget to buy up a domain name, we decided to prioritise finding a name with an available .com. We used quite a few different techniques: brainstorming with just the two of us, brainstorming with other Campers, name generators…
The brainstorming sessions didn’t reap much as we couldn’t quite manage to control them. In the end, however, we moved more towards the technique of having an English dictionary in one hand and a domain name checker in the other.
I think that now we are the experts on all the English words to do with language! We fell in love with babble, which is a funny little word, and all that was left to do was to find a second word to make sure that the domain name was available. Babble Planet was not necessarily the name that we liked the most, but it was available and simple it was available and simple, and we were only three days out from the Beta release.
What does Babble planet mean?
Literally you could translate it into French by “la planète du balbutiement”. It represents the idea that, through our game, kids learn how to speak English, and will therefore chatter away in whatever they know in English. It also represents the playing community, Babble Planet, who come together and play against one another. Lastly, the word planet represents the idea of the exploration and discovery of different parts of the world through the game, because each level takes place in a different country.