Posted 5:12 PM by Floyd

On the way back from i2 I drove by an office that had a new occupant; it was a company called Encover. This is a typical Silicon Valley dot-com name, and it sucks. "Encover" sounds like an English word being mangled by, say, a wild and crazy guy from Bratislava.

Colby Cosh tells me that The Onion's imitations of early twentieth century newspapers -- especially T. Herman Zweibel -- are dead-on accurate in tone and style. Why not borrow from this period and name corporations after real people or real places, or the real things that they do?

I went to Encover's web site and found that they provide tools for selling services and support, targeted toward resellers. The president and CEO is named Sridhar Krishnan. Here are some suggested 1900-style names for Encover:

• "Krishnan Service Management"
  
• "Krishnan and Co, Ltd"
  
• "Mountain View Reseller Applications"
  
• "Shoreline Service and Support Tools"