Mercedes
This was actually the financier’s daughter’s name. [Reminds me of The Count of Monte Christo]
Adobe
This came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John Warnock. [Always thought it had to do something with the building material of the same name, probably due to my architectural tendencies]
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
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 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
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.
Procter and Gamble:
William Procter and James Gamble might never have met if had they not married sisters. The father of the brides convinced his new sons-in-law to become business partners and as a result, a bold, new enterprise was born.
Maybelline:
T.L. Williams created the Maybelline Company, which was named after his sister Maybel, whose dark lashes inspired him to come up with the idea of producing and selling an easy-to-use product to darken eyelashes.
Lacoste:
Rene Lacoste, a famous tennis player had a winning bet with his team captain over an alligator skin suitcase and after winning the bet, he started wearing an embroidered crocodile on his tennis blazer. He later founded a company to manufacture the shirt, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Flogers Coffee:
In 1850, an entrepreneur was looking for a carpenter to build his first coffee mill in
Wendy:
Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy’s Hamburgers, dreamt of running the best restaurant in the world, when he was eight and from the age of 12 he started following this dream. In 1969, his dream came true and he opened the first Wendy’s Old Fashioned.
Baskin Robbins:
As a teen, Irvine Robbins worked in his father’s ice cream store and Burton Baskin, was a Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy and produced ice cream for his fellow troops. They started out in separate ventures but later their separate identities merged into a single ice-cream chain, world knows as Baskin-Robbins.
BMW
Of course they are initials. But in this case for words that are almost unpronounceable in English - Bayerische Motoren Werke.
Nobel Prize
The famous peace and science prizes, named after Alfred E. Nobel - who invented dynamite!
Nike
Round about evolution from Phil Knight - the founder - as proposed by one of his employees. The name was drawn out of a hat full of other submissions. That particular employee apparently awoke in middle of the night and said it had to be Nike - Greek for Victory
SAP
“Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing”, formed by four ex-IBM employees who used to work in the ‘Systems/Applications/Projects’ group of IBM.
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!
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