What’s in a Name?

Anyone who has named a company or a product may know the struggles of finding a moniker that is creative, catchy, memorable, catches the essence of what you are trying to name, AND is a name that is available and not near to some other name in the industry. In naming a company, you have to check for names registered with the state, domain names, trademarks in the industry, and more. As such, you may be curious how we settled on the names we did...

QCoherent Software

In naming the company, we definitely liked the word "coherent", as it has relevance in both lasers and software. For a laser, a key part of a LIDAR system, "coherent" refers to the fact that the light waves have the same direction. In software, "coherent" refers to software code that is orderly, logical, and understandable.

For a company name, however, coherent was taken 6 ways to sunday. So, we had to come up with something more to make it unique. Our idea was to add a single letter and since "quality" is a key value of our company, the letter we added was "Q". The correct capitalization is "QCoherent", and the full legal name is "QCoherent Software LLC".

LP360

For our first product  we chose the letters "LP" to stand for "LIDAR Processing". At first, we were going to add some numbers to indicate the capacity of the product in gigabytes. We came to realize, however, that our capacity did not have a specific fixed limit. How much data you could practically view vs. how much data you could load vs. how much data you could actually manage were all different things.

So, instead of a number representing capacity, we picked a number that represented our goal of building tools that fully leverage the information available in LIDAR point clouds. The number 360 represents a full rotation, perhaps of a snowboarder (we are in Colorado), or of a skateboarder. We thought this was a good match and added 360 to LP, creating the product name LP360.