Typing long text names on a mobile phone keypad is a pain. So we wanted a short name, no more than four characters, that could work in multiple languages and cultures. It didn’t have to mean anything in particular.
Realizing that most mobile phones have numeric keypads and that numbers are a universal language, we figured looking at an easy to remember numeric sequence to derive a word might be an interesting approach.
We couldn’t use the number “1″ key as usually it does not have any letters associated with it.
Besides “1-2-3-4″, the next most obvious and easy to remember numeric sequence is “2-4-6-8″. Looking at the letters typically associated with these keys on a standard phone keypad, we came up with “b-i-n-u”!