Ask HN: How do you come up with names for your apps/services?

I usually grab them from a science topic in Wikipedia. For example, these names come from astronomy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomy): Hubble, Nebula, Cosmology, Cosmogony, Galactic, Stellar...

Start a file somewhere (we did Google Docs) or even just a text file, and write down names as they come to you. Then after a few weeks, just look through the list (you will get ideas for new ones since there is a collection to look through).

To get started, this is also cool http://wordoid.com/

I've also used Mechanical Turk (have the job to submit 10 names, that doesn't have the .com still available for example).

I first convert it to a 1-2 word description of what it does, then translate to Japanese, then mangle it to sound cool (a lot of the time, no need to mangle). Note that there's no real creativity required.

translate related words to Swahili and look what sounds nice.