So What’s ”indeni”

Not a week goes by without someone asking me – “So, what’s indeni?”.

Those who know me well, know that when I notice something repeating itself, I try to find a permanent solution for it. So what’s a better solution than writing a post about it?

When we first started off working on what today is indeni, we didn’t have a name. We just had an idea and some initial code. We started talking to prospective users and at a certain point, one of them asked us, “So, what’s your company called?”

That’s the first time we realized, we actually don’t have a name.

Strange, but I guess that’s what happens when you try to run as fast as possible. Naturally, something had to be done about it.

There are different ways to pick a name. We decided to make it simple.

We looked at names of other companies, like Cisco, Juniper and SolarWinds, and realized the name itself means very little to the companies’ customers and partners. They may mean something to the founders, but that’s about it. This opened up a whole world of possibilities as there was no need to have a name that actually meant anything significant.

Me being me, I sat down and wrote a script to automate this process. The script took 10,000 words in English and put them through a known translation web service (without violating the terms of use, of course). It tried to translate the words to all languages that use Latin characters and checked the availability of the “.com” domain of the resulting word.

The script ended up checking the “.com” availability of roughly 150,000 words. Those words that had the “.com” available were saved to an Excel file together with their English meaning. It took less than three hours to code and run.

One of the words that came up was indeni:

in-de-ni -adverb ~ Danish.

:inside, indenfor, indeni, ind

That worked for us.

And so, indeni was born.