Why Startups Are Sporting Increasingly Quirky Names

The New York cousins who started a digital sing-along storybook business have settled on the name Mibblio.

The Australian founder of a startup connecting big companies to big-data scientists has dubbed his service Kaggle.

The former toy executive behind a two-year-old mobile screen-sharing platform is going with the name Shodogg.

And the Missourian who founded a website giving customers access to local merchants and service providers? He thinks it should be called Zaarly.

Quirky names for startups first surfaced about 20 years ago in Silicon Valley, with the birth of search engines such as Yahoo, (YHOO -1.85%) —which stands for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," and Google, (GOOG -1.55%) a misspelling of googol,” the almost unfathomably high number represented by a 1 followed by 100 zeroes.

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