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Comment by toastal | Hacker News Reader

I know it's a combination of 'taxi' and '-ify', but it reads too much like 'tax' and '-ify'. Taxes generally have a negative or necessary evil connotation which doesn't seem like a great company name. It's a good thing the scooters are not slated to go to the US, where 'taxes' are a four-letter word, or they might end up in the Boston harbor.

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Exactly my first inclination reading the headline. Why is a tax company entering the e-scooter game? Unfortunate naming.

I'm guessing they'd like everyone to pronounce them as taksēfi, not taksifi

As the article mentioned they aren’t a new company, they are the #1 ride hailing app in a lot of European cities.

Also, Taxify was founded by a 19-year-old high-school student from Estonia[1], who was probably neither a tax payer, nor a native English speaker.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxify#History

In which cities is it #1?

Taxify is huge (read: bigger than Uber) in the Baltics (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia) and in some African countries (Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa). It mostly focuses on Eastern European, Western Asian and African markets, where there is no single major player.

I was really wondering how taxes, an app, and e-scooters were going to somehow come together when I first clicked on the link

I clicked on this just to see why a Tax startup was investing in scooters. I will postulate that this is a terrible name. My stance on 'ground scooters' is still up in the air. Both annoying and convenient. I have to agree with another commenter that they seem to replace walking, not driving, a net negative.

Agreed. Something as simple as TaxiDash would be more communicative while avoiding that obvious pitfall.

>It's a good thing the scooters are not slated to go to the US, where 'taxes' are a four-letter word, or they might end up in the Boston harbor.

Maybe Portsmouth harbor. For the past century or so the people of Boston have been generally welcoming to taxes, nosy government and all the other things the Bostonians of the 1700s resented the British for. Their northern neighbors, not so much.

That still doesn't make "tax-$anything" a good company name for any business that doesn't have to do with taxes. Better to have a neutral and boring name than a name that some people associate with bad things.

It was historically about "taxation without representation", not taxes per se. It was a about democratic representation when creating the laws (and taxes) that were imposed on them.

I had the same visceral reaction, the notion of a transportation service get's lost in that name.

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