Power tools for naming products, services, and organizations.
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Lingzini was founded by Karl T. Ulrich, who is the CIBC Professor of Entrepreneurship and E-Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania. When he was in graduate school
in 1985, Karl created a LISP program called Namegen that generated names from fragments supplied by the user. He wrote it for fun while learning to program, but a few of
his entrepreneur friends found it quite useful. Since then, he got distracted with other things like becoming a professor, writing books, and starting companies. But,
with the incredible developments in web technology, he was inspired to revisit the original idea behind Namegen and create the Lingzini workpad. Karl has been a prolific
namer over the years, incidentally to his entrepreneurial activities. Some of the names of ventures he's participated in are: Xootr, ScoopFree, Terrapass, Epodia,
xpult, CrossRack, Nexride, and now Lingzini. You can see some of Karl's other activities at his personal website.
Lingzini is led on a day-to-day basis by its CEO, William (Billy) Beetzwaken. Billy and Karl have worked together for more than a decade in other entrepreneurial contexts.
Billy got his start at Lunar Design, in Silicon Valley, and has held a variety of senior roles in technology-based consumer product companies over the past decade.
Lingzini's technology wizard is Brian Ko. Brian grew up in Los Angeles but went East to the University of Pennsylvania to study computer science. Have a comment about the
Lingzini site? Let Brian know.
