Project codename: Finch

Product real name: Spicebird

Now that results are out of the way, I can delve into how we went about the entire process. So for those of you who don't have the time or inclination, that's all you need to know. For people curious about why this name, how it is related to Synovel and the work we are doing, please read on.

The whole naming process began when we needed to reach out to companies and gather feedback about our product thought and idea. We needed to create an introductory note our product and features and that's when we actually searched for a codename!

We began by trying to shortlist a category among science fiction, animal name, mythological name and so forth. Given that animal names have universal appeal we thought it would suit us the most. More importantly we could find animals that suited our product idea with their inherent qualities.

Our first consideration was collaboration - what animals collaborate? We searched among sea-faring animals (whales, dolhpins, fish etc.), land animals (like wolves etc. which move in packs), insects (like ants and bees which have very interesting group decision methods) and birds (like geese, ducks, parrots, mynahs etc.) So I explored several families of animals, birds and insects.

One of our considerations was that the animal should have a significant scientific significance and yet be relatively unknown as we needed to give it a new identity.

In an unrelated incident, a friend of mine asked me to read "The Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin. Before I got my hands on the book, I was just going through a few preliminary things when I happened to find that Darwin was inspired by the Galápagos finches. Observing them, he happened to begin the formation of his world changing theory of evolution through natural selection, one of the most significant scientific theories of modern man. I suppose we want to serve as a similar inspiration for enterprise collaboration. I wanted to know a little more about them and dug up some more information.

Finches happen to be the largest family among all the aves and they
are also considered to be one of the most evolved. Evolving quickly is a core value of our product! That sealed the deal for us. Thus was the born the project codename Finch!

Once the codename was chosen, we needed to find a real name for our product. I began researching the Finch family. For the name of our product, certain qualities were essential. The foremost among them was that it had to reflect our origin - India. We are proud open source developers in India and glad to be developing a product of this sort.

Among the finches from India, there was one named the Indian Silverbill. When I brought this up as a suggestion, it was immediately shot down. One of my colleagues said that he did not want our product to be associated with a Bill! That's the kind of fervour the team has for Free/Libre and Open Source Software.

We also needed to ensure that other features of the product were reflected in behavior of the species such as: Easy to integrate with other applications, easy to maintain and use and community oriented.

The only species that fit this description was the Spice Finch or Spice Bird. It is a bird which is amiable and easy to take care of (indicating ease of  use and user-friendliness), can interbreed with other species of finches easily (integration with other applications) and is one of the most social species that live and work together (community orientation). On top of all this, India is the land of spices and the name fits right in. 

The choice came down to SpiceFinch or SpiceBird. As we are using the efforts of previous birds such as TBird and SunBird, it is like a vedge formation where the effort to fly is minimized. As a token of respect to these birds, we named our product Spicebird.