Easy Money: Creative Names Mean ... Everything

In this merger-crazy dot-com age, many companies' answer to "What's in a name?" is "Everything."

Maybe they're just running out of stalwart options like General Motors (GM Quote) and General Electric (GE Quote), but companies now cram together whatever comes out of this morning's bowl of Alpha-Bits -- capital letters and all -- to come up with a moniker. It's sort of like a ransom note ... with probably about as much possibility of collecting revenue.

The all-in-one approach was previously the domain of German companies and merged entities (DaimlerChrysler (DCX Quote) and accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers). Now America has produced the likes of Homestore.com (HOMS Quote), Net.B@nk (NTBK Quote) and Qualcomm (QCOM Quote), whose all-caps approach on its Web site makes it seem a bellow at a tractor pull. All together now: QUALCOMM!

"At least it's a respite from the trend of naming a company 'something.com,' which is terrible," says Steve Manning, managing director of A Hundred Monkeys, a San Francisco-based naming company that's given the world Jawbreaker and Apples+Oranges. "It's not the job of a company name to give you the address." ...