How they named companies

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dipdude

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Check this out, makes for a interesting read :cool2:

How they named companies

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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.)

AMD- Advanced Micro Devices.

Apache- The name was chosen from respect for the Native American Indian tribe of Apache (Indé), well-known for their superior skills in warfare strategy and their inexhaustible endurance. Secondarily, and more popularly (though incorrectly) accepted, it's considered a cute name that stuck: its founders got started by applying patches to code written for NCSA's httpd daemon. The result was 'a patchy' server â€" thus the name Apache.

Apple- for the favourite fruit of co-founder Steve Jobs and/or for the time he worked at an apple orchard. He was three months late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computer if his colleagues didn't suggest a better name by 5 p.m. Apple's Macintosh is named after a popular variety of apple sold in the US. Apple also wanted to distance itself from the cold, unapproachable, complicated imagery created by the other computer companies at the time had names like IBM, NEC, DEC, ADPAC, Cincom, Dylakor, Input, Integral Systems, SAP, PSDI, Syncsort and Tesseract. The new company sought to reverse the entrenched view of computers in order to get people to use them at home. They looked for a name that was unlike the names of traditional computer companies, a name that also supported a brand positioning strategy that was to be perceived as simple, warm, human, approachable and different. Note: Apple had to get approval from the Beatle's Apple Corps to use the name 'Apple' and paid a one-time royalty of $100,000 to McIntosh Laboratory, Inc., a maker of high-end audio equipment, to use the derivative name 'Macintosh', known now as just 'Mac'.

BenQ- Bringing ENjoyment and Quality to life

Canon- Originally (1933) Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory the new name (1935) derived from the name of the company's first camera, the Kwannon, in turn named after the Japanese name of the Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy.

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.

eBay- Pierre Omidyar, who had created the Auction Web trading website, had formed a web consulting concern called Echo Bay Technology Group. " EchoBay" didn't refer to the town in Nevada, the nature area close to Lake Mead, or any real place. "It just sounded cool," Omidyar reportedly said. When he tried to register EchoBay.com, though, he found that Echo Bay Mines, a gold mining company, had gotten it first. So, Omidyar registered what (at the time) he thought was the second best name: eBay.com.

Epson - Epson Seiko Corporation, the Japanese printer and peripheral manufacturer, was named from "Son of Electronic Printer"

Fanta- was originally invented by Max Keith in Germanyin 1940 when World War II made it difficult to get the Coca-Cola syrup to Nazi Germany. Fanta was originally made from byproducts of cheese and jam production. The name comes from the German word for imagination (Fantasie or Phantasie), because the inventors thought that imagination was needed to taste oranges from the strange mix.
 
Hewlett-Packard

The co founders (Mr Packard and Hewlett ) tossed a coin to decide the order of the initials ..

Mr Hewlett Won and hence HP .... :)

CISCO - its not an acronym but the short for San

Francisco.

Google - the name started as a jokey boast 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 grad students Sergey Brin

and Larry Page resented 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 upper casing.

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'.

Kapor 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 MICROcomputer 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).

Acronym for: One Real ******* Called Larry Ellison ??

Red Hat - Company founder Marc Ewing was given the

Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes)

while at college by his grandfather. He lost it and

had to search for it desperately. The manual of the

beta version of Red Hat Linux had an appeal to readers

to return his Red Hat if found by anyone !

SAP - "Systems, Applications, Products in Data

Processing", formed by 4 ex-IBM employees who used to

work in the 'Systems/Applications/Projects' group of

IBM.

Sony - 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.

Xerox - The inventor, Chestor Carlson, named his

product trying to say dry' (as it was dry copying,

markedly different from the then prevailing wet

copying). The Greek root `xer' means dry.
 
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