HOW FAMOUS COMPANIES GOT THEIR NAME
1. Google
- originally named “Backrub”, the company was being changed to ‘Googol’,
a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros reflecting
the company’s mission to organize the immense amount of information
available online . The name was spelt incorrectly as “Google” in 1998
and it stayed . And you thought google is always correct , for the brand
name itself was a typo.
2. APPLE
— for the favorite 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 the company
Apple Computer if his colleagues didn’t suggest a better name by 5 p.m.
Apple wanted to distance itself from the cold,
unapproachable, complicated imagery created by other computer companies
at the time — which had names such as IBM, DEC, ADPAC, Cincom,
Syncsort and Tesseract — in order to get people to use them at home.
They looked for a name that supported a brand positioning strategy that
was to be perceived as simple, warm, human, approachable and different.
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’
(‘Mac’).
3. BBC
- was created by the British General Post Office . The company
was wound-up and on 1 January 1927 and a new non-commercial entity
called the British Broadcasting Corporation established under a Royal
Charter became successor in interest .The BBC than became the world’s
first national broadcasting organisation.
4. 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.
5. KFC
— short for Kentucky Fried Chicken. It is
popularly believed that the company adopted the abbreviated form of its
name in 1991 to avoid the unhealthy connotations of the word ‘fried‘.
In actuality, it is because the Commonwealth of Kentucky trademarked
the name “Kentucky” in 1990. Anyone who used the word “Kentucky” for
business reasons needed to pay licensing fees to the Commonwealth of
Kentucky. Kentucky Fried Chicken changed their name to KFC to avoid
paying these fees. Recent commercials have tried to imply that the
abbreviation stands for “Kitchen Fresh Chicken“.
6. INTEL
Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore initially incorporated their company
as N M Electronics. Someone suggested Moore Noyce Electronics but it
sounded too close to “more noise” — not a good choice for an electronics
company! Later, Integrated Electronics was proposed but it had been
taken by somebody else so they used the initial syllables (INTegrated
ELectronics).
To avoid potential conflicts with other companies of similar names,
Intel purchased the name rights for $15,000 from a company called Intelco.
7. Microsoft
— coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to
MICROcomputer SOFTware . Originally christened Micro-Soft, the ‘-’ was removed
later.
8. 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.
9. SUN Microsystems
— its founders designed their first workstation in their dorm
at Stanford University, and chose the name Stanford University Network
for their product . 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 with a
hope of selling it to the college. They didn’t
10. YAHOO!
— a “backronym” for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.
The word Yahoo was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book
Gulliver’s Travels. It represents a person who is repulsive in
appearance action and is barely human. Yahoo! founders David Filo and
Jerry Yang selected the name because they jokingly considered themselves
yahoos. It’s also an interjection that Southerners and Westerners use
to express their joy .
11. Audi
— Latin translation of the German name ‘Horch‘.
The founder August Horch left the company after five years, but still
wanted to manufacture cars. Since the original ‘Horch’ company was still
there, he called his new company Audi, the Latin form of his last name.
In English it is: “listen!“.
12. Fanta
— was originally invented by Max Keith in Germany in 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.
Thank you
