Origin of Brands

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.

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 Stanford University buddies, SUN is the

acronym for Stanford University Network. 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.

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.