Anyone who has named a company or a product may know the struggles of finding a moniker that is creative, catchy, memorable, catches the essence of what you are trying to name, AND is a name that is already not taken or near to some other name in the industry. In naming a company, you have to check for names registered with the state, domain names, trademarks in the industry, and more. As such, you may be curious how we settled on the names we did...

QCoherent Software

In naming the company, we definitely liked the word "coherent", as it means something to lasers and to software. For a laser, a key part of an aerial LIDAR system, coherent refers to the fact that the light waves have the same direction. In software, coherent refers to software code that is orderly, logical, and understandable.

For a company name, however, coherent was taken 6 ways to sunday. So, we had to come up with something more to make it unique. In naming my previous company, I created a name that was too long (24 characters not counting the word "corporation"). So, the idea was to add a single letter. Since "quality" is a key value of our company, the letter we added was "Q". The correct capitalization is "QCoherent", and the full legal name is "QCoherent Software LLC".

LP360

For our first product, we chose the letter "LP" to stand for "LIDAR Plug-in". At first, we were going to add some numbers to indicate the capacity of the product in gigabytes. We came to realize, however, that our capacity did not have a specific fixed limit. How much data you could practically view vs. how much data you could load vs. how much data you could actually manage were all different things.

So, instead of a number representing capacity, we picked a number that we thought was cool. The number 360 represents a full rotation, perhaps of a snowboarder (we are in Colorado), or of a skateboarder. I also think of our profile window and being able to rotate its view in all directions. Who knows, maybe our follow-on products will have names like LP540, LP720, or LP1080!