My friend Joey Nelson is part of the uber-smart team at MobileFWD, a local group of mobile developers (they make apps).

Joey says he and his wife Lauren and had tried everything to come up with a name for their baby girl.

We bought books, downloaded apps, looked into our family history via ancestry.com and many many other tactics. We even tried letting our dog pick but he just ate all the names. We never seemed to agree on any one name.

So what else does an iPhone app developer do, but name their baby through their app Trivi.al (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/trivial-free/id528357193?mt=8) via a question in the game.

We both had our lists on our phones and one night we decided to narrow it down to two names each. As we went out to dinner one night we mentioned we each had two, and one of our friends said we should put it into our game. The next morning I added it in our CMS [Author note: I have no idea what CMS is] and users started seeing it as they played.

No answer was wrong and lots of people were selecting their favorite. We tracked the choices from the app on our CMS in real-time and both my wife and I constantly looked at the selections as the votes came in.

When they got to the hospital Joey and Lauren knew they were going to let the app make the final decision. All pressure had been removed. However, when the sweet baby girl was born she had some complications with her breathing and went in to the NICU. The doctors didn’t exactly know what was going on with her, and several times mentioned possibly flying her to Little Rock Children’s Hospital. All the family had was hope and prayers for the next six days that she would be okay.

We noticed the top two names we’re Sophia and Hope and it was literally down to two votes difference. We felt she earned the name Hope and decided to go with that. We were all so hopefully that she would make it through, and it just all kind of came together during the course of the events.

Joey and Hope.

Needless to say, the story has gotten around on the Internet. Yahoo even wrote about Joey’s iPhone app baby naming adventures.

Follow Joey on Twitter @rfijoey to see what other shenanigans he’s up to.

Well played Joey.

Well played.