Its an important thing to get right, as it really helps if your company is easy to identify, has strong branding etc.

Has anyone come up with a good way to name thier company?, how do you find out if there is prior use of the name?

Single word company names seem to be the best, which makes finding web domains almost impossible.

Apparently it will have a huge impact on your companies "positioning" :)

.Z.

Well, we couldn't go wrong with Shaven Puppy.
Very memorable, and too obscene for anyone else to dare use it.

Cas :)

As I understand it, company names (in the US) are registered only in the state you are operating in. A name search would be preformed by the state when you applied for a DBA or tried to incorporate. I'm not there yet. :) I'm still stuck choosing between two names for my company. One is a short juxtaposition of two unrelated words nobody has registered yet (searching for it returns only three results), and the other has more character but is a common expression. I lean towards the former, but coming up with a logo design for it is murderous. I can see with the latter, on the other hand, a number of great logos. That one is more fun and reflective of my sense of humor, but I'm afraid of it getting lost in the sea of the internet and being harder to market.

I used to have a third name I was considering involving canines and alopecia but have recently decided to cross it from the list. ;)

Naming a company. I talked a bit about it in this thread (http://www.dexterity.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=122) . In that thread I said that my name was one of the bigest mistakes I have made (my post is about 3 or 4 down into that thread).

I feel everything I said in that thread is still correct, except one thing. I said I was looking for a name that returned very few results when searching for my name. While that can always be a good thing, I have come to think it isn't strictly necessary either. In fact, the name I am considering now would place me with several hundred search results. Of course, the important thing is that I think with a little bit of effort I could easly rise to the top of the list. The advantage to that is that you can generate a bit of extra exposure. Someone could search for something unrelated, stumble on my site at the top of the search results, then actually find my site interesting. However, a company with a very distinctive name doesn't get this benefit since just about the only way to find it in a search result is to search for it explicitly.

As far as trademarks are concerned, do your own searching. I'm not sure about the process of incorporating, but registering a simple DBA with your state (as you do for a sole proprietorship or partnership) does NOT get you a trademark search. At least in Michigan, all they did was make sure no other DBA was registered in the state under that name. No other Kronos Software, so I was fine. Of course, that didn't help me to uncover the trademarks held by Kronos Digital Entertainment, so now I am trying to figure out what to change my name to before my company gets any bigger or before said company takes notice and mails me a friendly letter. Had I just gone to the USPTO web site and did a search for Kronos before coming up wth my company name, I would have found this problem in about 5 minutes. And as I said in the above mentioned thread, when you search for trademarks, you are mostly interested in anyone with the trademark as an IC28 trademark. When you do your search at uspto.gov, use the search phrase:
(<word>)[COMB] AND (028)[IC]
And if that comes up clear, then do a search for just:
(<word>)[COMB]
and make sure nothing else seems like it could cause a problem. If you do find something in the IC28 class, check to see what product they specifically make. If they only make golf shoes or something, you are probably in the clear to use the name anyway. Of course, I am not a lawyer, so consult yours first.

As far as single name domains, yes very good but difficult to get these days. The name I have in mind right now has the one word domain already registered (about 4 years ago) but has never been used (at least its empty now and has no history at archive.org) and does not appear it was intended for a company. The <word>games.com domain is open so that is what I am planning on snatching up, and then seeing if I can buy the <word>.com domain from the owner (or maybe he'll forget to renew it sometime in the future).

As far as how to come up with the name, that's elusive. My current name was just something I've been using for several years. It spawned off from my nick name (Lord Kronos) which came as an adaptation from the god name Khronos (or maybe it was spelled Chronos). To find that name, I just looked through my Dungeons & Dragons - Deities and Demigods book until I found something I liked. D&D has lots of cool monster names if you look through the Monster Manuals (Monstrous Compendium for you younger D&Ders, but once again Monster Manual for the even younger ones) and other assorted handbooks.

The way I came up with my current candidate was to pick a handful of words that describe my games. Then I looked up definitions & synonyms for other ideas. Repeat that process a few times, and pretty soon I came up with a description I liked that somehow related to my games but wasn't so tied to them that it would interfere with me making other games (most people probably wouldn't even draw a link between the name and a game type).

When we were trying to come up with a company name, having something short and available as a domain (with .com) was a big priority. We basically went to http://www.internic.com/whois.html and typed in everything we could think of that was short.

We'd basically start with a suffix or prefix and go from there. For example, we eventually started brainstorming names with "soft" as the suffix. I started typing in bopsoft, lopsoft, mopsoft, tipsoft, lipsoft...and then hipsoft.

And the rest, as they say, is history. :)

(well, actually we put that into our top 3 list (as #1) and then used a service to do a name availability check)

Good luck!
-Scorpio

This is a cool website to use for getting domain name results, it is very powerful:

http://www.whois.sc

I find using this is much easier than using a normal whois search.
I cannot vouch for whether or not they're trustworthy though.