Wednesday, September 16, 2009

What's in a Company/Brand Nam?


Now, I didn't check my source on this one. But, here's what's rumored and entertaining nonetheless...

Mercedes
This was actually the financier's daughter's name.

Adobe
This came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house
of founder John Warnock.

Apple Computers
It was the favorite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was three months
late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his
company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn't suggest a better
name by 5 O'clock.

CISCO
It is not an acronym as popularly believed. It is short for San Francisco .

Compaq
This name was formed by using COMp, for computer, and PAQ to denote a
small integral object.

Corel
The name was derived from the founder's name Dr.Michael Cowpland. It
stands for COwpland REsearch Laboratory.

Google
The name started as a joke boasting about the amount of information the
search-engine would be able to search. It was originally named 'Googol',
a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros.
After founders- Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page
presented their project to an angel investor, they received a cheque
made out to 'Google'

Hotmail
Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a
computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the
business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in
'mail' and finally settled for hotmail as it included the letters "html"
- the programming language used to write web pages. It was initially
referred to as HoTMaiL with selective uppercasing.

Hewlett Packard
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the
company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.

Intel
Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company 'Moore
Noyce'but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain so they had to
settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.

Lotus (Notes)
Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from 'The Lotus Position' or
'Padmasana'. Kapoor used to be a teacher of Transcendental meditation of
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Microsoft
Coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICRO
computer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the '-' was removed
later on.

Motorola
Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company started
manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radio company at the time was
called Victrola.

ORACLE
Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the
CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The code name for the project was
called Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to give answers to all
questions or something such). The project was designed to help use the
newly written SQL code by IBM. The project eventually was terminated but
Larry and Bob decided to finish what they started and bring it to the
world. They kept the name Oracle and created the RDBMS engine. Later
they kept the same name for the company.

Sony
It originated from the Latin word 'sonus' meaning sound, and 'sonny' a
slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.

SUN
Founded by 4 Stanford University buddies, SUN is the acronym for
Stanford University Network. Andreas Bechtolsheim built a microcomputer;
Vinod Khosla recruited him and Scott McNealy to manufacture computers
based on it, and Bill Joy to develop a UNIX-based OS for the computer.

Yahoo!
The word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book 'Gulliver's
Travels'. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and
action and is barely human. Yahoo! Founders Jerry Yang and David Filo
selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos

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