Saw Tooth Distortion™:

The first version of Xona.com was originally called Saw Tooth Distortion™ (hosted at www.sawtoothdistortion.com, now forwards to Xona.com).  Saw Tooth Distortion was originally a video game business idea Jason Doucette and I worked on.  "Saw Tooth Distortion" is a play on the phrase "sawtooth distortion", which means the sawtooth effect, or "blocky" effect, you get when zooming in on low-color computer graphics with no (nearest-neighbor) filtering.

Xonatech™ / XonaTech™:

In need of a new name, the second version of Xona.com was going to be Xonatech™ (hosted at www.xonatech.com, now forwards to Xona.com), as we were unable to register xona.com because we were unable to make contact with the owner.  Xonatech was a very nice title and URL, and we would have been happy with it.  (We now commonly refer to our tech articles section as XonaTech™.)

Inspired by our desire for xona.com, and before we negotiated a deal to obtain it, we had considered registering xek.com (asked for $6,000 USD, listed at $10,000 USD) and xend.com (listed at $750 USD.)  For historical purposes, this would have been mid-2005 when I priced these domains.  It turns out xend.com would have been a bad choice due to the popularity of zend.com (as in Zend Optimizer).  Maybe someday I will post the full list of domains I considered before deciding on Xona.com.  It is huge.

Xona.com™:

We are now, finally, Xona.com™. The previous owner of the xona.com domain name is the entrepreneur who invented the original Rambo Knife, attorney Peter Klika!

Shorter Domain Name Length:

It's interesting to see how the length of our domains got shorter and shorter:

• http://www.sawtoothdistortion.com/
• http://www.xonatech.com/
• http://www.xona.com/
• http://xona.com/

We decided to drop the "www." as we wished to be known as "Xona.com", not "Xona", and that URL best fit our title.  One positive to the non-"www." URL is a shorter domain name length.  One negative is a non-"www." URL is less often made clickable automatically (by email, forum, and other software).

I am still not sure which URL makes more sense, and I can see already from inbound links that some people naturally call us "Xona" regardless of our "Xona.com" title.  One positive to being call "Xona.com" instead of "Xona", regardless of what choice we make with the URL, is that you do not need to repeat your title to showcase your URL, as the dot-com title handles it already.

External Links:

• Evolutionary Prototype (sawtoothdistortion.com; Xona.com's original video game project)
• Sawtooth Distortion (Wikipedia)

About the Author:  I am Matthew Doucette of Xona Games, an award-winning, indie game studio I run with my twin brother. We concentrate on nostalgic game concepts with modern-day gameplay and intensity. Our company, our games, and our technology have all won prestigious awards and received worldwide press. Our games have ranked from #1 in Canada to #1 in Japan, as well as become #1 best sellers in multiple countries. Read about our story and our blog.