We went through hundreds of options when we were thinking of a name for the service. We ended up crowdsourcing votes for peoples’ favourite names over Yammer - the microblogging service we use at Clyral.
isiZulu is the language of the Zulu people with about 10 million speakers, the vast majority (over 95%) of whom live in South Africa. It is the native language in the KwaZulu Natal province where our Clyral offices are based. Since we are focussing our efforts on predominantly Zulu speaking people, we thought it would be very appropriate to adopt part of the language in our name.
In the end, Mobenzi came out on top. We combined the first half of the word ‘Mobile‘ (a little clichéd perhaps) with part of the Zulu word for ‘task or work’ which is ‘umsebenzi‘. The name therefore means ‘Mobile Work’ which we hope will help carry the concept through South Africa’s Bantu (Including other similar African languages) speaking population and will be catchy and easy enough to pronounce for others.
Looks great. Good luck. Would be good to include a simple description of how Mobenzi works in practice.
Thanks Brian. We will definitely be adding a lot more information to the blog over the next few weeks – including much more detail about how the process works.
This is great guys, the name certainly communicates the essence of your work and how the cellphone provides work opportunities. I agree with Brian about the description, it makes immediate sense to us because we have the background information on the project, I am not sure the same will apply to other readers who do not have the same background information.