How Big Companies Got Their Name

8/4/2019 How Big Companies Got Their Name

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HOW BIG COMPANIES GOT THEIR NAME

Here are some interesting stories about how big companies got their

names.This list is placed in alphabetical order

Adobe Systems got their name from a small creek, called an adobe,

that ran through Charles Geschke's yard, he was the Adobe co

founder, along with John Warnock.

Accenture ± from "Accent on the future". The name Accenture was

proposed by a company employee in Norway as part of an internal

name finding process (BrandStorming). Before 1 January 2001, the

company was called Andersen Consulting.



Amazon.com ± founder Jeff Bezos renamed the company 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

The company name was taken from its founder Adolf (Adi) Dassler

whose first name was shortened to the nickname Adi. Together with

the first three letters of his surname it formed ADIDAS.

Apple ± For the favorite fruit of co-founder Steve Jobs and/or for the

time he worked at an apple orchard, and to distance itself from the

cold, unapproachable, complicated imagery created by other

computer companies at the time ± which had names such

as IBM, DEC, and Cincom



Cisco ² short for San Francisco. It has also been suggested that it

was ³CIS-co´ ² Computer Information Services was the department

at Stanford University that the founders worked in.

Coca-Cola ± derived from the coca leaves and kola nuts used as

flavoring. Coca-Cola creator John S. Pemberton changed the 'K' of

kola to 'C' to make the name look better.

When Canon was founded in 1933 under the name Precision Optical

Instruments Laboratory. Two years later they adopted "Canon" after

the company's first camera, the Kwanon. Kwanon is the Japanese

name of the Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy.



DHL ± named after its founders, AdrianDalsey, Larry Hillblom, and

Robert Lynn.

eBay ± Pierre Omidyar, who had created the Auction Web trading

website, had formed a web consulting concern called Echo Bay

Technology Group. "Echo Bay" did not 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.

FIAT ²FabbricaItalianaAutomobiliTorino

(Italian Factory ofCars of Turin).



The name started as a jockey boast about the amount of informationthe 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

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the

company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-

Hewlett.

Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing email 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 wasinitially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casings.



IBM ± named by Tom (Thomas John) Watson Sr, an ex-employee of

National Cash Register (NCR Corporation). To one-up them in all

respects, he called his company InternationalBusiness Machines.

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 INTegratedELectronics.

Lego ± combination of the Danish "leg godt", which means to "play

well".[46] Lego also means "I put together" in Latin, but Lego

Group claims this is only a coincidence and the etymology of the

word is entirely Danish. Years before the little plastic brick was

invented, Lego manufactured wooden toys.



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.

It was coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was

devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened

Micro-Soft, the '-' was removed later on.

Nokia ± started as a wood-pulp mill, the company expanded intoproducing rubber products in the Finnish city of Nokia. The company

later adopted the city's name.



Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for

the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). 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).

Pepsi ± named from the digestive enzyme pepsin.

Qantas ±, Queensland And Northern Territory Aerial Services.

Reebok is simply an alternate spelling of "rhebok," an African

antelope. The company founders found the word in a South African

edition of a dictionary won by the Joe Foster, son of the Reebok

founder J.W. Foster.



SAP ± SystemAnalyse und Programmentwicklung (German for

"System analysis and program development"), a company formed by

five ex-IBM employees who used to work in the

'Systems/Applications/Projects' group of IBM. Later, SAP was

redefined to stand for Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte in der

Datenverarbeitung (Systems, Applications and Products in Data

Processing).

Sony ± from the Latin word 'sonus' meaning sound, and 'sonny' a

slang word used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster, "since

we were sonny boys working in sound and vision", said Akio Morita.

The company was founded as Tokyo Tsoshiu Kogyo KK (TokyoTelecommunications Engineering Corporation) in 1946, and changed

its name to Sony in 1958. Sony was chosen as it could be pronounced

easily in many languages.

Skype ± the original concept for the name was Sky-Peer-to-Peer,

which morphed into Skyper, then Skype.



Sun Microsystems ± its founders designed their first workstation in

their dorm at Stanford University, and chose the nameStanford

University Network for their product, hoping to sell it to the college.

They did

The name Twitter was picked out of a hat. A small group of employees

from Odeo, the San Francisco podcasting startup where Twitter

initially began, had a brainstorming session. They were trying to

come up with names that fit with the theme of a mobile phone buzzingin your pocket with an update.After narrowing down the options

(which included Jitter and Twitter), they wrote them down, put them in

a hat, and let fate decide. Fate decided on Twitter

Suggested to the founder Richard Bronson by a friend who claimed

they were ³complete virgins at business´



Verizon is a combination of the words veritas, which is Latin for

"truth," and horizon.

Volkswagen literally means "people's car." Adolf Hitler initially came

up with the idea for "cars for the masses," which would be a state-

sponsored "Volkswagen" program. Hitler wanted to create a more

affordable car that was able to transport two adults and three children

at speeds of 62 mph. He choose the car manufacturer Porsche to

carry out the project, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Vodafone ± from Voice, Data, Telefone. Vodafone made the UK's

first mobile call at a few minutes past midnight on 1 January 1985.



The name Yahoo! is an acronym for

YetAnother HierarchicalOfficiousOracle," but Filo and Yang insist

they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a

yahoo: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth.The word was invented by

Jonathan Swift and used in his book Gulliver's Travels. It represents aperson 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.

The Greek root "xer" means dry. The inventor, ChestorCarlson ,

named his product Xerox as it was dry copying, markedly different

from the then prevailing wet copying.

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