How parking reservation startup Parking Panda picked its company name

Pandas might not be the first thought crossing your mind when you’re trying to reserve a parking spot downtown for that show at the Meyerhoff on Friday night.
But Parking Panda cofounder Nick Miller said that’s OK.

“Parking Panda is memorable. It’s a name that rolls off the tongue and so it’s easy for people to remember,” wrote Miller in the Wall Street Journal.
The company formed during Baltimore’s first Startup Weekend event in April 2011 and took first place. It was during that weekend when random-name inspiration struck, as Miller recalled in a WSJ post:

In our scramble to find a name, we started out very literal, with ideas like RentASpot and Parking Renter. None of these domain names was actually available, and that was a good thing, because at the end of the day these would have been poor name choices for our business. They weren’t memorable and they really didn’t mesh with the kind of brand we wanted to build. It was when we had run out of ideas when someone said, “You just need a mascot.” For whatever reason, my co-founder and Parking Panda CTO, Adam, immediately responded, “Parking Panda. Pandas know parking.”

Read Technically Baltimore’s interview with Parking Panda cofounders Nick Miller and Adam Zilberbaum.