Random Modern Business Names

I love random names. Especially the strange, odd, esoteric, cool stuff people come up with across the world. I’ve long wanted a business name database and I finally procured one. It is pretty massive at 21 million entries for the U.S. I’m pretty certain there is not 1 business per 15 residents, which lead to the original data conversion.

However, many of the entries are not useful for my context. They did not contain a NAICS or SIC code that usefully designated the business. Not to mention that many entries are duplicated. Plus the expected duplication of names across the nation. After trimming, taming and normal data tweaks, I ended up with about 5.5 million entries. I retained the duplicate entries across states because I may want state specific names at some point.

Presenting the information is a challenge. If it is too fine, selecting between categories is a nuisance. The general industry classification breaks out 700 odd entries. Moving it up one level in the NAICS standard still results in 99 categories. For some purposes, 99 is better but fails with specific desires. Scrolling through 700 entries isn’t happening with the 3 second attention span of most web users.

So I’ll start with 99: Modern Business Names. It is somewhat useful. The data needs additional cleanup and frankly 99 categories is far too many. In the months to come, I may split out what I believe are interesting industries into individual generators. I have a few in mind.

If there is a particular industry that would be useful, let me know. Or if you want to drill down into 700 different categories, I’m open to that as well. Until that happens, coarse will work.

World Wide City Name List

For those that love to browse names rather than generate random results, I’ve launched my latest list utility — The World Wide City Names. As the name suggests, the city, town, and village names from over 100 countries are available as alphabetic lists. There are a few edge cases where no data is returned that I need to rectify. Still, the number of folks looking for city names now have an alternative choice.

Enjoy.

Convergence 2014

The 2014 venture into the Colorado Rockies is complete. The event was once again held at the base of Mount Evans at 10,000 feet in the University of Denver Alpine Field station. Holding the event at altitude is not without risk — one of our five participants had regular touches of altitude sickness. Nothing major but it did sideline him on occasion but never progressed to the point I needed to haul him back the thicker air of the Denver area.

We had five participants this year from 3 states. Three of the five flew in prior to the event. Role playing games were slim as I failed to prepare anything prior due to other responsibilities. So card games were the name of the game for most of the weekend — Magic, Munchkin and Drinking Quest.

The newest participant, Garrett, ran the one RPG over two sessions. He used the Big Eyes, Small Mouth RPG with the players involved in an alternate modern fantasy environment. It was odd. It was strange. It was a heck of a lot of fun even if it wasn’t what I expected.

Many thanks to all the guys who always make the weekend enjoyable. Glad you could come up and looking forward to 2015. I may have to invest in a oxygen bottle.

Browsing Friendly & New Generator

Several people have requested browse friendly lists of names rather than my random generator chaos. I was reluctant. Chaos is what I do. However, I do understand the desire to see a big list and select from that. So I started with the medieval name database. The starting point is Browse-able Medieval Names. I couldn’t just produce 26 pages so I wrote code to allow you browse between 3 categories * 26 letters all on the same page. It’s not AJAX enabled like I generally do but I learned a few things doing it in alternative way, form free. Browse away, anti-random heretics. I still appreciate you and sometimes need massive results to inspire my creative flow.

If that serves the needs, I’ll likely open the Old West and Modern name databases in a similar fashion. I’m going to wait a few weeks before making that call. It’ll be trivial to open the other databases after working through the first iteration of the code.

Oh yeah, there is new stuff: Rap Sheet / Criminal History. I’ve been pondering this topic for a while and released the pure random variant. Eventually, I want to make it smarter so it can generate progressive criminal backgrounds rather than a few randomly selected elements. For now, it is sweet, tasty chaos.

I hope you all are having fun playing games, writing new fiction, or doing whatever brings you to my random corner of the internet.

City Name Generator Update

While it has been a few months since I’ve turned my attention to the City Name Generator, I never forget about my longer term plan to ingest data from every country on the planet. Today, I expanded the list by adding nine additional countries: Belize, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Paraguay, Uruguay, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana.

The additions are smaller countries or ones that I just overlooked during the original build out of the generator. Most of them have fewer than 2000 identified names in the database. The first push was to get results for larger countries or those with many different town names available to maximize the database information. Now, I am turning my focus to smaller countries or those with a less dense population. After all, neither geographic stature or population density equate to interesting results.

Today’s update should fill in coverage for Central and South America. Next, I’ll turn my attention to Africa, Asia, or the Middle East. Or perhaps all 3.

Random Bank Names

What was once a habit of trolling for new ideas has slacked off of late. I blame summer for heat and distractions. Tonight, I overcame my typical summer lethargy to roll out a new generator: Bank and Financial Names.

The current database consists of a mere 14,000 entries. If it proves useful to others, I can easily expand by substituting city names with other results from the City Name generator. Country and country names are also plausible although I removed most of those from the default output.

In other news, I’m looking at a new hosting provider. Almost half the time I try to upload new content to the current host, it fails. Tired of dealing with their half-assed solution to the actual problem.

Adding a bit of Geographic Diversity to the Restaurant Name Generator

Added in some establishments from Chicago, Denver, Larimer County Colorado, Portland and El Paso. Unique name count is now up to nearly 70000 entries. I still need to purge the DB of what I find less than useful but its far better than what it once was.