Who takes gold in tech’s top 10 ‘most peculiar’ name-game?

Cockroach Labs is a cloud-native, distributed SQL database founded in 2015 by former Google employees Benjamin Darnell, Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis. Some of its notable customers include Comcast, Lush and Bose who build their cloud data architectures on the company’s open source database CockroachDB. 

Pinned “the database you can’t kill,” we can’t help but admire the genius behind the company’s name strategy. “While the connotation of the common cockroach is unpleasant, the durability of the bug perfectly represents the durability of the database,” wrote Dan Kelly in a blog. 

While that did provide some short-term relief, I’m getting the heebie-jeebies and will probably go wash my sheets now. 

Hugging Face is a company that uses machine learning (ML) to build applications, most notably natural language processing applications, and allows users to share ML models and datasets. It was founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf originally as a chatbot app but turned its focus to being a platform for ML. Its most recent partnership was with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in February.

The company was named after the cheerful emoji that looks like a smiling face with jazz hands, but all we can seem to think about are the face huggers from Alien — not exactly ideal. 

Ansible is an open source community project which claims its suite of software tools to enable infrastructure as code is the “only automation language” that can be used across entire IT teams. Ansible, Inc. was founded in 2013 by Michael DeHaan, Timothy Gerla and Saïd Ziouani to commercially support and sponsor Ansible. It began as a project sometime in February of 2012, according DeHaan, and was acquired by Red Hat in 2015. 

The term "ansible" was coined by Ursula K. Le Guin in her 1966 novel “Rocannon's World,” and refers to fictional instantaneous communication systems. Funny how that works. Personally, our favorite Le Guin book is “The Left Hand of Darkness.”

Bard is a generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot experiment released by Google. Bard was first announced in February by Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai as a response to the rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT potential threat to Google Search, a claim later denied by Pichai. Bard had a limited capacity rollout in March of 2023 and recently expanded to multiple countries in May.

The chatbot was given the name "Bard" in reference to the Celtic term for a storyteller and was allegedly chosen to "reflect the creative nature of the algorithm underneath.” We think Bard sounds lovely. Like an old pal you’d grab a cup of Joe with – or someone who wears a bow-tie and a pocket scarf — a monocle is optional.

Gearlinx was founded in 2021 by David McCullough as a software as a service (SaaS) solution with remote access and connectivity. It recently debuted ZERO, a cloud-based centralized management service which works with the company’s Duckfone hardware.

Now what on earth is a Duckfone? While we imagine a rubber duck with miscellaneous wires exploding to and fro, this Friendly Floatee connects to the serial or Ethernet port on the back of an SD-WAN router, switch, UPS or firewall. Thanks, Gearlinx. 

NVIDIA’s Grace Hopper chip combines the company’s Grace and Hopper architectures for accelerated AI and high-performance computing (HPC) as a way to build generative AI data centers that can also run 5G. The Superchip was announced to be in full production as of May of this year. 

Dust off your history books — Grace Hopper was an American mathematician and computer scientist on top of being a high-ranking U.S. Navy officer credited with co-creating the first commercial electronic computer and writing the first computer manual. She’s best known for her contributions to computer programming and the design and implementation of programming languages. So yeah, she’s a big deal. And, NVIDIA — you're pretty cool for this name-drop.

Panoptica, Cisco’s “code to cloud security coverage” solution, was announced in June 2023. It's currently being developed by engineering teams at Outshift by Cisco, the incubation engine for emerging technologies as an observability tool that weaves through APIs and open source, workload after workload, plus multi-cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) environments to monitor the “permitless” attack surface. 

Panoptica is derived from Panoptic, which means having the ability to see all around and take in all parts in a single view. The word is used to describe something that is comprehensive. We see what you did there with the word play, Cisco.

Parse.ly is a technology company that provides web analytics and content optimization through natural language processing. Its first product, Parse.ly Reader, was launched in 2009 by founders Sachin Kamdar and Andrew Montalenti of DreamIt Ventures. The company was acquired in 2021 by Automattic. According to Kamdar, the company was originally called Cog Tree, but no one liked it.

“We liked the word ‘parse’ because we’re geeks,” said Montalenti in a blog, “and it’s a word that means coming to an understanding of some piece of content, or some piece of text.” Voila, Parse.ly was born.

We couldn’t help but pull some archives, so let’s begin with COOL-ER from UK company Interead. The discontinued e-book reader was compatible with Mac and Windows and came in a variety of colors, much like our beloved iPod. If we pick apart COOL-ER’s name, the ER stands for e-book reader. The “cool” part is still ill-defined, because not many people thought this e-reader was cool. 

Rather, the company cooled off maybe a little too much, hence its liquidation in 2010 after failing to secure funding. 

Ah, another “fone.” While the Bone Fone definitely didn’t advocate for ‘Network Resilience as a Service,’ we still thought this 1979 release was something worth mentioning. After all, the Bone Fone wasn’t a phone at all, but a radio speaker marketed to joggers as a less bulky alternative to headphones. It was invented by Bill Hass and released by JS&A.

The logic behind this one? Unfounded. But, who isn’t persuaded by a radio scarf that “surrounds your entire body with a sound almost impossible to imagine?” Touché, also unfounded and slightly concerning. (This YouTube review of the Bone Fone was definitely worth the watch during our lunch hour.)

Having a bad day? Need a good laugh? Check out more of our Top 10s here.