Hooked on Fonics, and the Tragedy of Domain Name Driven Business Naming

| tech | startups | bullshit |

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

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Keeping sponsor lists up-to-date

Keeping sponsor lists up-to-date across multiple READMEs and websites is tedious - so I wrote a tool to automate it.

via Carlos Becker March 25, 2026

Code as a Tool of Process

Steve Krouse wrote a piece that has me nodding along: Programming, like writing, is an activity, where one iteratively sharpens what they're doing as they do it. (You wouldn't believe how many drafts I've written of this essay.) There’s an incre…

via Jim Nielsen’s Blog March 24, 2026

Paris's Bicycle Mayor and the Hormuz Shock

Why Energy Independence is an Enduring Antidote to Trump's Demented Chaos

via High Speed March 24, 2026

Generated by openring