Re: Where did the name "iboats" come from,..???......
Here is what I remember...and given that it was 7 years ago this month that my son and I started iboats.com...and the fact that my memory is slipping fast
...here's what I think happened.<br /><br />We first looked at
www.boats.com. The person who owned that name wanted a LOT of money for it...so we passed since I self-funded the company and money was (and still is) a dearly precious commodity.<br /><br />We then looked at other online companies who were around at that time to see if there was any kind of a pattern or model of naming online companies that we should follow. We saw companies and organizations using names like ebay, imall, ivillage, Amazon, eMachines, E-mail, IANA, Yahoo and ICANN. We also knew that we wanted to be (and focus on) boats and boating online...meaning on the Internet...and that we wanted our name to reflect that fact. And we also thought that we would want to do e-commerce at some point. <br /><br />Additionally, we wanted the name to reflect boats and boating in the plural, not singular form of the word. We also did not like the idea of using a dash (-) between a letter and a word, or between two words.<br /><br />The more we looked at different possibilities the more we likes "iboats" instead of some other name. In October 1998 when we started, the use of .com was much stronger then using .net, (and remains so today) so we selected the .com version to add to iboats. <br /><br />We also saw that some companies, like ebay, did not use any capital letters in their name, and we likes that idea. So we do not ever capitalize any of the letters in the name iboats.com.<br /><br />So, there you have it.
www.iboats.com<br /><br />Today when people ask me about our name, iboats.com and what it stands for, I usually say that the "i" stands for or reflects our strong usage of and our being on the Internet, versus our being a bricks and mortar company, and that we are all about boats and boating. So we combined the two ideas into our name. At that point the person usually say something profound like, "oh"
<br /><br />BV
