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, team-of-two indie studio concentrating on "intense retro" games (Xbox LIVE, PSN, WiiWare, and Windows PC). We've released Decimation X (XBLIG), a 1-4 player shmup, #1 best selling and #1 top rated XBLIG in Japan. We're working on Duality ZF (XBLA), a groundbreaking 1-4 player shmup, which placed #1 in Canada and #5 in the world in Microsoft's Dream Build Play 2010 contest. It features dual play, the ability to control two fighters at once, and a massively upgradable 32-stage spread/laser weapon system. 4 player dual play allows up to eight fighters at once.  Many of these features are never before seen shoot'em up firsts. Both games feature beautiful electronic Imphenzia soundtracks.  Help spread the word with our official dualityzf.com and decimationx.com websites.

P.S. Watch out for Score Rush (official website scorerush.com), another 1-4 player shmup. Coming soon to XBLIG.

*Shmup also known as: shoot'em up, 2D shooter, scrolling shooter, space shooter, spaceship shooter, retro shooter, etc.