Internet entrepreneurship used to be so simple: Just drop a little “i” or an “e” in front of a company name and wait for the venture funding to roll in.

Not anymore.

In fact, in today’s market, a zippy dot-com name can do more harm than good. So name-meisters are busy crafting a new breed of startup identities.

“If you take a too-trendy, psychedelic title suggesting you have a high-tech company or Internet spinoff, then you’re looking for trouble,” said Naseem Javed, president of New York-based ABC NameBank International. “People are fed up and tired with them, because there are 100 success stories and 20,000 failures. That pretty much puts the nail in the coffin.”

Still, the name matters – but in a different way than it used to.

“We’ve turned our attention to names that evoke something about the company and that can be branded effectively,” said Karen Reed, vice president of creative development for Santa Monica-based incubator eCompanies.

Reed and her staff of 12 are spending an increasing amount of time on name branding, a process that has been given short shrift by too many tech companies.

“We’re turning back to core branding values that have been around for years, which is essential for the survival of the company,” Reed said.

Names that won’t be around for years are the cute and clever ones that mean literally nothing, she said.

“A name needs to speak loud and clear that it’s a long-term brand,” Reed said. “And it needs to engender trust and respect.”

As an example, for a new company specializing in online mergers and acquisitions resources for small businesses, Reed and her team considered various acronyms and provocative Greek names, but eventually settled on the simple “USBX.” The name is concrete, no nonsense and has value to the company, Reed said.

Restructured identity

“What’s happening is a new and very intelligent re-think of how one exists on the Internet in terms of one’s name,” said Ira Bachrach, president of NameLab Inc., a Silicon Valley-based branding company.

Bachrach preaches to his clients on the importance of “information propagation.”

“If you observe what works on the Net and what doesn’t, many of the names that have collapsed are ones that have nothing at all to do with what’s going on at the company,” Bachrach said. “There’s a trend away from dumbly descriptive and bizarre names and towards names that imbed ideas and which are novel enough that they’re proprietary and can go worldwide.”

Also, the names must be effective in terms of search-engine function, because around 95 percent of all new visits to commercial Web sites come through searches, not advertising.

That means a name like “Fogdog.com,” which looks great on a billboard or in a television commercial, does little to draw customers online, Bachrach said. In fact, FogDog Inc. is a cash-strapped online sporting goods retailer facing layoffs.

Bachrach’s firm, which can fetch millions of dollars for a moniker makeover, specializes in creating “neologisms,” such as “WebVan” for an online grocer and “PayMap” for an online automated payment business.

Bachrach said such names rank high in search engine results for their respective businesses. Also, the names are functional across linguistic borders and, because they are new, can be easily registered in many nations.

Gone are the New Economy names that merely conveyed a hip, Internet-savvy corporate identity.

Choosing carefully

Javed of ABC NameBank, who authored the book “Domain Wars,” said it’s time for a “serious and sober approach” to naming.

“No matter how volatile or unstable the market is, the fact is, if your name is not well known in cyberspace, you’re going to go out of business,” Javed said. “The challenge is that, when you develop a name for a New Economy or Old Economy company, you must follow the rules of trademark laws, the rules of domain name registration, the rules of marketing and the rules of international languages.”

Javed argued that generic names – such as “Drugstore.com” or “China.com” – will not survive because the current system allows similar names, which will chip away at any uniqueness the generic name had.

But there is apparently a market for certain generic names, such as “America.com,” currently listed for sale at Chatsworth-based domain broker GreatDomains.com for $30 million.

“I think the best name for a company is the short generic name,” said GreatDomains.com President Steve Newman. “They provide the most effectiveness for marketing, because it’s very clear what the company does and it’s easy to remember.”

Newman does not blame every dot-com failure on its name; plenty of companies suffer from faulty management and weak business models. The generic names used by failed companies will be bought by someone else and will turn up again under new management and a new business model, he said.

Avoid being trendy

“You want to beware of the clich & #233; names,” said Derek Wilson, partner at Morrison Foerster LLP. “The names that are really trendy and overused lose currency. You want to look for a name that’s enduring and substantive. We’ve noticed that people are starting to think of names that give a strategic focus to the company and identify in the mind’s eye what the company is about.”

Still, what matters most to Wilson is the management team and the business model. He said that if a company comes forward with a trendy name, it often suggests that it’s “just another me-too company.”

The finite supply of those pricey and quickly selling generic names caused the recent push for new domain suffixes. More than 40 Web businesses applied to control a new collection of Internet addresses that end with something other than the generic dot-com or dot-org. The applications carry a non-refundable $50,000 fee.