How did the name "Pingsta" come to be?
Many of you have asked us what Pingsta means, and since we can’t resist the opportunity to tell a good story whenever the chance presents itself, here it goes…
The name “Pingsta” was born after months of caffeine-powered deliberations (caffeine is, as you might have observed by now, a big part of our life here). Pingsta is a combination of two words. The first word, “PING”, is the acronym for “Packet InterNet Groper”, a troubleshooting tool used to test IP network connectivity. Ping is also commonly used as a verb… “to Ping” meaning to “IM”, call, email ( in other words, to contact) someone. The second word (well… half a word actually) is “Sta” – derived from the word “Star” as a subset of “Superstar”.
As we set out to create an environment where technology enables people to communicate and collaborate seamlessly, we decided to follow that train of thought further, and it went something like this…
“This tool will help the world to ‘Ping internetwork Superstars’ (hmm, interesting)… ‘Ping Superstars’ (like it… but it’s way too long)… ‘Ping Star’ (better! Now, how can we make it sound modern. Let’s see… drop the “r” maybe?)… ‘PingSta’ (Eureka! we have a winner).”
/deka
P.S: Here are some other names that crossed our minds and the reasons why they were discarded:
- “Hubnob” (it initially sounded clever, but eventually reminded us too much of the failed Walmart attempt at re-creating Myspace)
- “Geekspace” (Myspace for geeks?… Boy, that sounded unholy!)
- “Citizen IP” (someone – who shall remain nameless – might have been watching a certain movie… Citizen Kane, perhaps?)
Alright, alright! We won’t bore (nor torture) you with the whole list of unusual (and sometimes funny) names we entertained during this entire process. Let’s just say that Pingsta sounded like music to our ears.
