Need a Baby Name? Nymbler Has A Hunch About What You Might Like.
Erick Schonfeld
20 comments »
Any parent knows how hard picking a name for a baby can be. The Web makes it easier to research names, but the majority of baby-naming sites simply overwhelm you with too many choices. You can check out the most popular baby names in the U.S., map those names around the world, look to celebrity baby names for inspiration, or even graph a given name’s popularity over time. My wife and I have gone through this exercise twice with our own three-year-old and one-year old boys (Sebastien and Emile). All I remember from the process is scrolling through endless, brain-numbing, alphabetical lists that made one name seem indistinguishable from the next. We ended up going offline for our final inspiration.
A better approach is a site called Nymbler. You type in names that you like but aren’t quite perfect enough, and it suggests a bunch of similar names based on origin, sound, meaning, and overall style (as defined by baby-naming expert Laura Wattenberg). Then you can refine your search further by indicating whether you love or hate each suggestion. Maybe you like some of the currently in vogue names for girls (Madison, Sophia, Emma, Olivia), but want something more distinctive. Nymbler spits out Madeleine, Ivy, Angelina, and a dozen others. Some of them are awful, but keep clicking through and you are likely to find a few gems to put on your list of finalists.
Turns out you are having a boy instead, but you only came up with a list of girl names? No problem, Nymbler can make connections between names of either gender. For the same list of popular girl names above, Nymbler comes up with Silas, Jasper, Theo, and Pierce.
What makes Nymbler interesting, though, is that it is just a demo for search and discovery technology called a Hunch Engine that was developed by Icosystem. Founded by complexity scientist Eric Bonabeau, Icosystem is a Boston-based consulting firm with about 25 people, about $4 million in revenues, and is nicely profitable. It’s main bread and butter comes from helping Fortune 500 companies like Eli Lilly with drug discovery or Harrah’s Casinos with data mining consumer behavior. But Bonabeau recently told me that he plans on transitioning Icosystem’s business in 2008 towards more of a software model by taking some of his custom algorithms and turning them into more generic software that is easier to deploy.
His Hunch Engine uses behavioral clustering to make personalized suggestions based on no more than two or three clicks by a user. “How can I help you make better decisions, especially when you don’t know what you are looking for?” asks Bonabeau. That is the goal of the technology. And it can be applied not just to baby names, but to image search, shopping suggestions, drug discovery, or any other data-mining task.
For instance, Bonabeau showed me another Hunch Engine demo for a photo editing application. It took a fuzzy, dark photo and then displayed a grid showing different editing enhancements. With a couple clicks, what was a throw-away image became legible without the user having to know anything about photo-editing. This could come in handy as a user interface for mobile devices, especially camera phones that tend to take crappy pictures. We’ll be keeping an eye on Icosystems to see what Hunch Engine apps pop up in 2008.
“Mom, why is my name so wacky?”
“Oh, sweetie, it’s all Nymbler’s fault!”
Horrible, doesn’t easily explain the difference between inspiration and favorite, have to scroll down to hit block… Anyone look at this from a GUI point of view?
great looking user interface, but not too sure about usability though.
Don’t see a point of it
I think the idea is good, but it turns out to be just like all the other baby name sites out there… how about just http://ababy.name?
Sorry Nymbler you’re too late, I already picked my baby’s name from
http://www.ganstaname.com
“Cow-tippin Drug Smuggla”
my bad http://www.gangstaname.com
Can’t go there now, Nimbler is to close to Nambla. Misspell the site name and I will need a new Job. I will wait to I get home and everyone is in bed before I read it.
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The thing about Web 2.0 is that it is hard to tell a web site that may be just a demo from a site that someone is try to build a company around. Until I went back and read the entry entry, I thought someone was seriously trying to create a business around this basic concept.
Interesting concept. I wonder if it will gain traction…
Totally agree about the usefulness of Nymbler. I’ve been using it for the past few months as I look for names for my first child due in April. Some of Nymbler’s suggestions have already made my short-list.
Thanks very much Eric for mentioning the Baby Name Map which is a personal project of mine. FYI, the site also lets you graph a name’s popularity over time; as well as see where it is popular around the world.
does anyone get it?
how is it different from just select a list of names and order them by rand()?
then you can add a conditions that dun pick name that sounds like xxx?
MA, it would be great if you can elaborate another practical example of how the hunch engine can be used.
D’oh! Sorry, I misspelled your name in my previous comment. Here’s the popularity of your first name when spelled correctly.
I’ll tell you one thing I’m not gonna name a baby: Nymbler. “If you like the names Mumbler and Nambla you should name your baby Nymbler!”
Lucky thing baby names aren’t as exclusive as .com names.
@ Jonathan [13] - actually, I think Nymbler is a cool name.
I’m gonna call my 14th that. I’m so excited! She’s due next month.
Thanks for the tip Erick. By the way, what did your parents use? I guess it was back in the days before spellcheckers became common!
There’s another site, http://www.name-a-baby.com that let’s you enter all the names you’re considering and then shows you all the possible combinations so that you can see (and hear) which ones work best together. Very cool. Plus you can save lists, mom and dad can each rank order their favorites, and some other stuff. All good stuff.
Interesting use of the Hunch Engine, although I’d say Nymbler is a little too reliant on a single expert to assign trends and historical info. I’d like it more if the results were continuously influenced by clicks and outside voting.
Until the technology has improved, I’ll find names and and parenting advice from The GoodFather for new dads. http://www.drmoz.com
A mob boss that has 15K+ baby names and can teach new dads how to change diapers is a parenting resource they can’t refuse. Ha!
I don’t really like the names this site spits out. I prefer using this baby names site.
What a cool way to find a baby name. This will change things I think. It would be interesting to see the distribution of the names parents choose from this tool vs. other methods (the heinous lists you mentioned)
Definetly a great way of finding unique names. I used http://www.baby-how.com
to come up with a name for my son. I might consider using this one the next time around