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What’s in a name?

Posted by maureen

June 1, 2007 |

Have you ever wondered how some of the best known and largest companies got their names? Here’s is a list which might contain some surprises for you. Some of the web-tech companies have some interesting facts behind their names…just for fun see how many you know

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Adidas- from the name of the founder Adolf (Adi) Dassler.

Adobe- came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the houses of founders John Warnock and Chuck Geschke .

AltaVista- Spanish for “high view”.

Amazon.com - Founder Jeff Bezos renamed the company to Amazon (from the earlier name of Cadabra.com) after the world’s most voluminous river, the Amazon. He saw the potential for a larger volume of sales in an online bookstore as opposed to the then prevalent bookstores. (Alternative: It is said that Jeff Bezos named his book store Amazon simply to cash in on the popularity of Yahoo at the time. Yahoo listed entries alphabetically, and thus Amazon would always appear above its competitors in the relevant categories it was listed in.)

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

BMW- abbreviation of Bayerische Motoren Werke (Bavarian Motor Factories)

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

Coca-Cola- Coca-Cola’s name is derived from the coca leaves and kola nuts used as flavoring. Coca-Cola creator John S. Pemberton changed the ‘K’ of kola to ‘C’ for the name to look better.

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 founders’ name Dr. Michael Cowpland. It stands for COwpland REsearch Laboratory

eBay - Pierre Omidyar, who had created the Auction Web trading website, had formed a web consulting concern called Echo Bay Technology Group. “Echo Bay” didn’t refer to the town in Nevada, “It just sounded cool,” Omidyar reportedly said. Echo Bay Mines Limited, a gold mining company, had already taken EchoBay.com, so Omidyar registered what (at the time) he thought was the second best name: eBay.com.

Fuji- from the highest Japanese mountain Mount Fuji.

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 “Googal”, a word for the number represented by I followed by 100 zeros. After founders - Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor, they received a check 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

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

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

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.

Pepsi- Pepsi derives its name from (treatment of) dyspepsia, an intestinal ailment.

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


Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. gmack on June 1, 2007 8:49 pm

    as Johnny would say… “I did not know that”. interesting stuff

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