Pandarine
How Klomi got its name
The game was called MoPet for most of its development — short for Mobile Pet. It described the product exactly, which is precisely why it could not stay: a name that describes what a thing does belongs to everyone, and on an app store it vanishes among a hundred others. Before the first listing, it needed a real one.
The rule that decided everything
A name that describes what the product does cannot be protected, and is almost always taken already. A name that means nothing can be owned — but says nothing on its own. The way out is to split the job: the name carries the identity, the subtitle carries the meaning. Klomi does not tell you it is a virtual pet. Your pocket companion, right underneath, does.
Anything ending in -gotchi, or containing -pet, virtual, nano or neo, was ruled out before the search even started. Those are either registered or unregistrable.
Twenty-six candidates, three survivors
Each name was checked against the app stores, the domain registries, and evidence of real commercial use. The results were brutal — and the pattern in the failures turned out to be the most useful thing we learned.
- Tibbo — a live trademark in class 9, the exact class a mobile app needs, held since 2003 by a Taiwanese electronics company.
- Zibbo — an active casual-games portal that publishes on mobile. It has already shipped a virtual pet game. Same class, same genre, same platform.
- Pochi — an existing browser virtual pet, and the name of an official Tamagotchi character. Two disqualifications at once.
- Kompi, Amiko, Petito, Pouki — every one already carried by a live product or a registered mark.
The most crowded corner of the store
The second round searched specifically for names meaning pocket or companion. All ten were taken. That is not bad luck: every developer who makes a virtual pet reaches for the same three roots — poc-, ami-, compa- — so those names went years ago. Pookie, Pooki, Poki, Pokipet, Mochi: they are all already on the App Store, all in this exact genre.
Klomi survived precisely because it sits outside that field. Its warmth comes from the sound rather than the sense — the -mi ending, close to ami and mi, does the work a literal word would have done, without the collision.
What a name actually has to carry
A name is not asked to explain the product. It is asked to be sayable in three languages, to survive a search of the stores, and to still fit when the studio makes something else. Klomi does those three things; the subtitle does the explaining. That division of labour is the whole method, and it is the part worth reusing.