The app itself will allow for crowdsourcing to collect event data. In the context of a distributed organization, a single account can be created to which anyone can add events. If needed, moderators can be assigned to review new entries.
But we’re not so far yet. Now let’s first try to pin a domain name.
I did some brainstorming and came up with a shortlist of five domain names:
www.calendarmaps.com – gives the basic concept of combining map and calendar data
www.mapsnow.com – based on Google maps, and adding the ‘now’ query; accidentally reads like map-snow… is that good or bad?
www.sempery.com – from latin ‘semper’, meaning ‘always’
www.timewarpmap.com – combines concepts of time and map
www.timespots.net – combines concepts of time and ‘spot’, what can mean both time and location; .com domain is already taken!
Personally I liked ‘calendarmaps’ and ‘sempery’ best. The first because it’s very down to earth giving the basic concept of the app: to combine map and calendar data. The second because it’s more exotic, sounds OK and is cross-cultural. But I couldn’t really decide.
So let’s organize a survey! I knew about the concept of crowdsourcing. A while ago I checked out Amazon’s Mechincal Turk, so I went back to see if it could host my survey. Alas not, as this service is open for USA members only. The alternative is CrowdFlower. It takes less than an hour to explore the site, make an account and define a first survey job. The job briefly describes the app and asks the worker to select from the shortlist the most catchy domain name. You then set the number of results you want (50) and the fee that you want to pay each worker (0.10 euro), giving a total cost, including platform costs, of 6.65 euro. The complete survey only took about one hour to render the requested 50 results, by 50 participants from all over the world!
These are the results:
The winner is very clearly www.mapsnow.com and my personal favourites end up in the end of the line… quite surprising.
So I went to my registrar to get the domain, but it looks like I didn’t do my homework properly and the domain is only available through a one-time payment of $1500. Which is not in my business plan… Looking silly now, what should I do? Fall back to the www.mapsnow.net counterpart? Or take the second in class www.timespots.net (note that timespots.com comes for > $2500). I guess the .net option is for good reasons not considered as a good idea. Third in class is www.timewarpmap.com… Bummer, I have the feeling that it’s time to reconsider all of this. Nevertheless, it was a nice experience to work out an evening with my 50 workers!
I did some more brainstorming and made a new shortlist of five available dot-com names. Here are the results after throwing anoter 6.65 euro in the basket:
It’s not my personal favourite, but we have a winner, and the domain name of the new web service will be www.maptiming.com! Next up is changing this blog’s title and linking it to blog.maptiming.com. This is how the task on CrowdFlower looked like:
Select the most catchy domain name for a new web app
Instructions
A new web app will allow for searching on a map to find locations and scheduling information. A customer can publish data, e.g. a store can publish shop locations and opening hours, a national church can publish local places of worship and schedules of services, a rock band can publish where and when they will play during the next season, a football club can publish location and dates of the matches, etc
A shortlist of five domain names for this web service is proposed below. The task is to choose the name that attracts you most.
This is what the app will look like, giving the example of a national church organization publishing places and times of worship.
