Origin of Company's Brand Name
There are many companies / brands / products whose names were derived from strange circumstances:
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.
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). 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 Scot t 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.
Contributed by ElBe
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