With the ink barely dry on my recent post to my recent post "Kango becomse UpTake, Vailoma becomes TripSay - seems it is easier to buid a product that get a good URL these days" comes news that Asian based meta-search company and News Ltd investee Bezurk is now called Wego. Here is the press release. New name comes with some additional features around trip planning and some very SEO friendly looking destination and flight routing looking links.I exchanged a an email with founder and Chief Marketing Office - Craig Hewett to understand more. Here is an edited version of our exchange.
BOOT: Does this mean that the name Bezurk will fade away or will you keep the two in parallel?
Hewett: We will slowly transition Bezurk.com users to Wego.com over the next few months, so until then both sites will run in parallel but the intention is to eventually redirect bezurk.com to Wego.com
BOOT: How hard was it to pick a new name and get a new URL. Can you share some names you rejected?
Hewett: Coming up with brand names which we liked was the easy part the hard part was finding ones which were available as a dot .com as well as the key country domain extensions.
In the early part of the process we kept up coming up with made up names which incorporated: trip, search, flight and they all sounded too similar to other exiting travel site names.
We lived on http://instantdomainsearch.com/ which tells you instantly as you type whether a domain is registered – speeding up the search process. We ended up combining different words together and searching close to 2000 names and landed up discovering wego by pure luck.
Fortunately for us Wego was owned by a company in the US who had acquired the domain when they acquired another company a few years back and had no real use for it and happened to put it up for sale a few days before we came up with the name. So we snapped it up straight away.
ed - Craig also mentioned that some of the names researched and rejected by the Wego team included tripsearchr, triptasia, tripseekr, tripkiv, tripsecretary, trippa , tripblender, tripdecision and trippursuit. But as Guillaume over at Hotel-Blogs points out the last thing the industry needs is another "trip" based name.
BOOT: Still focused on Asia or pushing out to other parts of the world?
Hewett: ...primary focus will be on Asia Pac consumers. We are fortunate that Wego.com as a brand name lends itself globally should we have global aspirations
Pithy ending - I like the new name (but was also a fan of the Bezurk name). Am glad that Craig and Martin dodged the "Trip" name bullet. New name and News funding = busy 2008. Their only worry now is that people confuse them with the World Evangelical Gospel Outreach (yes it exists).
Disclosure - in the past I have consulted to Bezurk/Wego
9 comments:
What luck these guys had ! I am developing a travel start up and am having huge problems trying to find a domain name for our business. I would sell my granny to get my hands on a cool name like Wego. Every bloody name is gone and all the available ones like Wego sell for over US$100,000 - thats my entire start up capital.
The name is stuck in my head now like a catchy song lyric. “Wego where you go” or “wego before you go” Whilst I make for a crappy Ad copy guy, I can see that with a bit of finessing of ad copy that the Bezurk guys are on a winner here.
Does anyone know what Wego was before Bezurk bought it? When World Reservations International http://www.webresint.com/ bought Boo.com they had to manage the risk of consumers negatively associating them with the previous owners of Boo.com (who failed famously)
If Wego fail to monetise travel effectivley they could monetise God, at the very least the World Evangelical Gospel Outreach members must travel so could do with a Wego seach box on their site.
For those of you who are interested to view some of the party photo's from our Wego launch party you can find the photo's on the link below
http://www.wego.com/blog/2008/05/16/photos-from-the-wegocom-launch-party/
"We lived on http://instantdomainsearch.com/ which tells you instantly as you type whether a domain is registered – speeding up the search process."
For a domain search try http://www.psychicwhois.com/ - it's even better, shows suggestions as you type.
Finding a short and easy to remember domain name is hard enough. Finding a name which means something, indicates what the website provides and does not restrict growth is near impossible now days.
I am thankful that we managed to find such a name, however it took days of brainstorming and a lot of searching.
Jonathan, the suspense is killing me ...... whats the name which you came up with ?
Duh! I just got the name.....its We-go, what a fab name for travel site and its so short and easy to recall.
There should be more regulation around domain reselling/squatting. I got a quote once for a domain at 150k Euros. Such a scam.
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