[dreeves]

It's hard for me to evaluate Baidu as a name since it's targeted at Chinese speakers but the literal meaning is apparently just "hundreds of times" (interesting parallel with Google, come to think of it). I don't see any brilliant connection with that poem. It was just "inspired by it", like how Yahoo's name was "inspired by" by a 300-year-old book by Jonathan Swift.

You may have a point about cutesy names but it probably boils down to a warning to try to be timeless instead of trendy.

I actually think purposeful misspellings can be a good idea. To quote myself from http://messymatters.com/nominology :

Violating spellability is less of a problem than you'd think. People seem sufficiently used to alternate spellings. And mostly the name won't be conveyed by literal word-of-mouth. You see the weird spelling and it kind of sticks. Examples abound: google vs googol, youtube vs utube, digg vs dig, reddit vs readit/redit, stickk vs stick, wii vs wee (or we or oui).

Besides, it's often worth the hit to spellability to fare better on greppability and googlability. Or even the incremental bump on brevity (looking at you, vowel-droppers).

Here's StickK nailing every other criterion (the extra K even lends slightly more evocativity — K is the legal abbreviation for contract) by sacrificing spellability...