13 3 / 2012
Where did the name Parking Panda come from?
Parking Panda was born in April 2011 at Startup Weekend Baltimore. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Startup Weekends, they are basically weekend long events where you are tasked with building a prototype and high level business plan in two days. While we were hacking together the first version of Parking Panda at this event, we were also looking for a name. What we discovered, was that buying a good domain name is really hard. We probably tried to purchased a few hundred different domain names involving parking. Each of these was already being used, or really just parked by a domain squatter. We had no idea what we were going to do so we put the issue of coming up with a name aside. After all, building product is more important than a name.
We came back to the issue of a name later when another participant said that we just needed to get ourselves a mascot. Adam immediately followed up that comment with “Pandas know Parking”. Why he came back with this we will probably never know, but with that, Parking Panda was born. Originally, this was intended only to be a temporary name while we could figure out what we wanted. At the time we couldn’t even buy www.parkingpanda.com, we had to buy www.parking-panda.com. However, after winning Startup Weekend Baltimore with this name and realizing that we could build an awesome brand around the panda, we decided to make it permanent. In the end it was a great decision; after all, who doesn’t love a panda?
