Naming a company is a hard thing. It is difficult enough to come up with a name that captures the essence of your vision, but it’s even harder when you need to find a name with a .com domain available. Nate and I had explored many avenues. Pretty much any word in the dictionary (even most foreign words) is taken. We started doing “mash-ups” by taking two words and putting them together. We tried to use words that expressed some aspect of our vision. We focused on ideas like “green”, “environment”, “connected”, “smart”, “energy”, etc. We tried mashing up English words, foreign words, Latin words, but nothing sounded good and had the domain available.

Finally, Nate came up with something we both liked which had an available .com domain. So we plan to name our company:

Aptility

The basis for the name was the Latin word “aptus”. It can mean both connected as well as suitable. It is the root of the English word “apt”, which also has multiple meanings including “smart”. Of course the suffix for the name is “utility”. So Aptility is sort of smart/connected utility. Once we decided on the name, I immediately registered the .com, .net, and .org domains. For the moment there’s nothing on the page except a “Under Construction” notice on ZoneEdit (where it is currently parked). Next up is a logo design…

Technorati Profile

The CCTO Release the list of 2007 finalists. I am happy to say that our team, Euclid Street Technologies, is a 2007 finalist in the Smart Power category. A lot of green blogs picked up the news such as Cleanenergy.org, Green Wombat, earth2tech, and Earth 911.

Over the past couple week, Nate and I have been doing more planning for the new company. We still haven’t come up with a name, but we do have office space now. Since Nate was a graduate student at UC Berkeley, he was able to get a temporary space in the Berkeley Entrepreneur Laboratory. It is a non-profit lab providing this free service to Berkeley graduates. It currently houses 5 or 6 companies. We have a small cube with two desks (see above picture). It’s not much, but you can’t beat the price! I commute to Berkeley a couple times a week by driving to the Fremont BART station, riding BART to downtown Berkeley, and walking up tot the office. It’s about a 1.5 hour commute in total, but I’m able to read or get some work done while on the BART.

Today was the CCTO’s Green Building Symposium, sponsored and hosted by Google. Nate and I met at a Starbuck’s near the Google campus a few hours early to get some work done. We spent a few hours trying to come up with a company name to no avail. We tried all kinds of names using various words and various languages, but it’s very difficult to come up with something that sounds good and has a .com domain available. We eventually gave up for the day and headed over to Google.

First of all, I was a little disappointed with the facilities a used at Google. We were not in the main building as originally planned, and the room we did get was neither an auditorium nor big enough to accommodate everyone. The poster board sessions were crammed into small conference rooms along the edges of the main area. The presentation area was just a large section of office with rows of chairs instead of cubes. There weren’t nearly enough chairs for everyone. That aside, the panel was pretty decent. It included a Stanford professor, an architect, a venture capitalist and a VP of a concrete supplier. It was interesting to see how these various people viewed the future of the green building industry. One point they all seemed to agree on was that this market has a lot of potential. As our business relates to residential heating and cooling, this should bode well for us.

Today we had a double shot of symposiums: Renewable and Energy Efficiency, bot sponsored by PG&E (as well as some other California utility companies). The symposium was at the PG&E building in San Francisco. Again it was set up as panels. The renewable panel had discussions about various renewable energy technologies such as solar, wind and biomass. The panelists consisted of representatives of companies in these areas as well as someone from the venture capital community. The panel was interesting, but not all that related to what we are doing.

The Energy Efficiency panel was mainly focused on efficient lighting solutions, which mostly meant LED lighting. The panelists consisted of academics, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists, but all related to efficient lighting. Since this was the category we entered, it was a little disappointing to see the lighting only focus. As it turns out, we were moved into the Smart Power category, so it didn’t really matter. From the panel it looks like LED lighting will take over from Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs (CFLs) in the next 5 years or so. Right now they are mainly just too expensive for standard lighting use.