Our Name

In the “Our Story” blog post, I refer to an email I sent to myself about the idea for Abovo42, but I used the hypothetical domain “Publish.com.” I was originally considering a name that was literal to the vision. Other considerations included Post.com, Forward.com, Email.com, etc. But I then thought about businesses I admire most – Google, Amazon, Twitter, even Facebook – whose respective founders went with an abstract brand name with some hidden meaning. While their names/domains didn’t convey their value proposition when they were a startup, per se, the names allowed the businesses to expand beyond their initial vision and roots without going through a painful re-branding exercise. Can you imagine if Google was originally named SearchEngine.com, Amazon was originally named BookStore.com, and Twitter was originally named RealTimeAsynchronousMicrobloggingCommunicationsPlatform.com? ;-)

“Abovo” is Latin (Ab ovo) and means “from the beginning, the origin, the egg.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_ovo, which gives it a nice tie-in to our technology. “Abovo” is also one of my favorite compositions by the legendary jazz composer (and my composition teacher in college), Hank Levy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hank_Levy. The piece was recorded by Hank and many of my college friends while I was studying with Hank.

42 is an homage and reference to the tech geek cult classic “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy_(novel). In this 1979 book (and 2005 movie) , a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings demand to learn the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything from the galaxy’s most powerful computer named Deep Thought (Deep Thought was built specifically for this purpose). It takes Deep Thought 7½ million years to compute the answer. Turns out the Answer to Life, the Universe, and EVERYTHING is… wait for it… 42. :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aboZctrHfK8

So, when combined, the name Abovo42 literally and figuratively means…

“From the egg” of “the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything” but consolidated down to 7 friendly characters. Oh, and the domain was available for registration. ;-)

Sean P. Fenlon
Founder/CEO