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

Is Zig's New Writer Unsafe?

If we wanted to write a function that takes one of Zig's new *std.Io.Reader and write it to stdout, we might start with something like: fn output(r: *std.Io.Reader) !void { const stdout = std.fs.File.stdout(); var buffer: [???]u8 = undefined; …

via openmymind.net September 20, 2025

Are you an experienced software buyer? I could use some help.

If it seems like I’ve been relatively quiet lately on social media and my blog, that’s because I have. Liz, Austin, George and I have been busy toiling away on the second edition of “Observability Engineering” ever since April or May. I personally have be…

via charity.wtf September 19, 2025

Class Warfare! Can I eliminate CSS classes from my HTML?

I recently read a brilliantly provocative blog post called "This website has no class". In it, Adam Stoddard makes the case that you might not need CSS classes on a modern website: I think constraints lead to interesting, creative solutions […]. …

via Terence Eden’s Blog September 19, 2025

Generated by openring