14 great companies and how they got their names; Most business starters spend a lot of time thinking of a good business name. This is because the company name matters! Here is how some of the world’s greatest companies got their names. Yahoo! The word ‘yahoo’ was used in the book ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. It represents a person who is vile, slovenly, stupid and barely human. Yahoo Founders, David Filo and Jerry Yang, selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos! Apple Computers Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple computers, was a vegetarian who named the firm after his favourite fruit. 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. (Of course they didn’t!) Corel Corel stands for COwpland REsearch Laboratory. The name was derived from the founder’s name Dr.Michael Cowpland. Compaq This name was formed by using COMp, for computer, and PAQ to denote a small integral object. Java There is a lot of stories about how ‘’Java’’ got named by the team of programmers at the Sun, but we will stick with the popular version. It was named Java, primarily because the Java bean coffee was popular amongst the programmers. 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 Intel is an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics. Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore settled for intel as their preferred name ‘Moore Noyce’ was already trademarked by a hotel chain. Google The story behind the name ‘Google’ is quite interesting. The founders- Sergey Brin and Larry Page decided to name the company after a really big number called ‘Googol’ which is the number 1 followed by 100 Zeroes. It was a clever attempt to convey the ample amount of websites their search engine could find in a flash. With a great product and a pretty cool name in hand, they went in search of investors. An angel investor they met loved the idea so much he decided to write a check on the spot. When he wrote out the check, he misspelt it as ‘Google’. The name stuck. And the rest, as they say, is history! Hotmail Founder Jack Smith had the idea of accessing electronic 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 different names ending in ‘mail’ and finally settled for hotmail as it included the letters “html” – the programming code used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective uppercasing. Microsoft The name was coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. It was first named Micro-Soft, but the hyphen (-)was later dropped. ORACLE Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The secret name for the project was the Oracle. Although the project was later halted , Larry and Bob decided to finish what they started and bring Oracle to the world. They kept the name Oracle and created the RDBMS engine. Later they kept the same name for the company. Sony The company name comes from the Latin word ‘sonus’ meaning sound, and ‘sonny’ a slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster. CISCO CISCO is short for San Francisco and not an acronym as popularly believed. SUN SUN is the acronym for Stanford University Network. It was founded by four Stanford university students. Andreas Bechtolsheim built a microcomputer; Vinod Khosla recruited him and Scott McNealy to manufacture computers based on it, and Bill Joy to develop a UNIX-based OS for the computer. The rest, as they say, is brand name history.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 09:01:49 +0000
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