Hooked on Fonics, and the Tragedy of Domain Name Driven Business Naming
I have long thought that it was slightly ironic that some of the most successful tech companies of our generation have been created around misspelled names. The reason for this of course, is due to limited amount of English words that can be used in a domain name, and the continued belief that if your company does not have a .com domain name then you may as well close shop right away.
I am guilty of this myself of course, since Statusy.co is a made up name that is a misspelling of “status” (and I did not even have the benefit of snagging a .com).
I wanted to bring special attention to this gem.
fonics.co.uk is a startup that is supposed to help kids learn how to read through the use of phonics. I find it utterly ironic that even in the world of education technology which is arguably the last bastion of hope for an educated future society, there is yet another misspelled name for a company.
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- 2024
- Reinstalling Windows at 1am
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- How to Disable Wayland in Debian Testing
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- The Software Essays that Shaped Me from Refactoring English
- Give Your Spouse the Gift of a Couple's Email Domain from mtlynch.io
- Skip the Next iPhone from Articles on Jose M.
- Have smart glasses finally hit an inflection point? from The Torment Nexus
- The McPhee method from the jsomers.net blog
- Pluralistic: LLMs are slot-machines (16 Aug 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Pluralistic: Bluesky creates the world's weirdest, hardest-to-understand binding arbitration clause (15 Aug 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Just a Little More Context Bro, I Promise, and It’ll Fix Everything from Jim Nielsen’s Blog
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Pluralistic: Carl Hiaasen's 'Fever Beach' (21 Oct 2025)
Today's links Carl Hiaasen's 'Fever Beach': If you didn't laugh, you'd have to cry. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Scary Godmother; Nightvale novel; The war on Worker's Comp; Cadillac's murdermo…
via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow October 21, 202510 pointless facts about me
Found on Kev’s blog and originally started by Dave, here are my answers to this fun blog challenge: Do you floss your teeth? Sometimes. I’d say maybe a few times a week? I’m terrible at being consistent, and that includes flossing regularly. Tea, co…
via Manuel Moreale — Everything Feed October 21, 2025Getting started with simple CSS View Transitions
There's (yet another) new piece of CSS to learn! Hurrah! Way back in 2011, jQuery mobile introduced the web to page-change animations. Clicking on a link would make your high-tech Nokia display a cool page-flip as you navigated from one page of a web…
via Terence Eden’s Blog October 21, 2025Generated by openring