Name Awards Blog

 

Every good movie fan knows that the way to secure your ticket before you rush down to the theater is to simply logon to Fandango.com - then you are ready to go.

What you might not know is that after struggling mightily to name his new service (and he didn't want another Ticketmaster like name), he finally came up with Fandango, only to discover the domain was held by a pizza parlor in Monterey, California.

Being a Silicon Valley startup, he jumped into his car and drove hastily to Monterey, and convinced the pizza place to sell him the domain for $100,000! Yes, those were the .com boom days.

To this day, there is still a Fandango pizza shop in Monterey. But now it has a nice new gleaming oven and a happy owner, and branches in places like Palo Alto... and a new domain -> FandangoPizza.com

However, there is a fly in the ointment! Fandango is the Spanish word for mess! Yes, they made a mess of this one.

Motto: Oh the errors that can be made when you are in a hurry and don't check linguistics!