How Popular Companies Devised Their Name? Is there any reason behind it?

• The name of this company started as a jockey boast about the amount of information the search-engine would be able to search.
• The word “Google” is a misspelling of the word “Googol”, which means a 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 and received a cheque made out to “Google”.
• The search engine of this company was originally nicknamed “BackRub” because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site and rank it in the search.

Apple

• The first slogan of this company was “Bite into an Apple”, while its more famous slogan is “Think Different”.
• Probably thinking differently, the founder, Steve Jobs, named this company “Apple Computers” while he was driving along with Steve Wozniak between Palo Alto and Los Altos. Jobs and his friends used to work on a community farm cultivating apples while he was working in the Bay Area of San Francisco.

Don't forget to subscribe to our FEED! Subscribe via EMAIL.

• Jobs was three months late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if his colleagues didn’t suggest a better name. As you can guess, they didn’t come up with anything better and the rest is history.
• Other theories are that Jobs wanted his company to feature before Atari in the phone book, while yet another suggestion is that it was a tribute to Apple Records, which was the music label of the Beatles.

Microsoft

• The word Microsoft is derived from the words Microcomputer and Software and it has an interesting history.
• Bill Gates used the word Micro-Soft in a letter he wrote to Paul Allen, the other co-founder of this company on November 29, 1975 and they later registered this company in this name on November 26, 1976.
• The hyphen was eventually removed and it came to be known from then on as Microsoft.

Adobe

• Adobe was named after the Adobe Creek in Los Altos, California, which ran behind the home of cofounder John Warnock.

Red Hat Linux

• This Linux distro that released in 1994 has an interesting history.
• Marc Ewing, who created this distro had been given the Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes) while at college by his grandfather.
• However, he lost it and despite looking for it did not find it.
• The information is revealed in the manual of the beta version of Red Hat Linux, which had an appeal to readers to return his Red Hat if found by anyone. Interesting, isn’t it?

INTEL

• At its inception, founders Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company “Moore Noyce” but discovered that this name was already trademarked by a hotel chain.
• Also, they felt that it didn’t sound nice as the pronunciation was eerily similar to ‘more noise’, which is not suitable for a semiconductor company.
• They used the name NM Electronics for the first year before arriving at Intel, which is the acronym of INTegrated Electronics and that is how the company has been known since.

HP

• HP or Hewlett-Packard got its name from the founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, but the story of its name is nonetheless interesting.
• Hewlett and Packard could not agree as to whether the company should be named Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett, so they decided to resolve the matter by tossing a coin.
• Packard won the toss and decided to name it Hewlett-Packard Company in 1939

Mitsubishi

• Established as a fishing firm in 1870, this company was renamed to Mitsubishi Shokao in 1873.
• The name Mitsubishi consists of two parts – “mitsu” meaning three and “hishi” (becoming “bishi” when the words combined) meaning water caltrop.
• This is also the reason why the logo of the company is shaped similar to this – three rhombus shapes with their vertices meeting at the center.

Yahoo

• Originally named “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”, this company was renamed to Yahoo! in April 1994.
• Yahoo is the official backronym of “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle” and it is also a word invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book Gulliver’s Travels.
• It represents a person who is rude, uncouth and unsophisticated, something which Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo considered they were.

Samsung

• The word Samsung means three stars in Korean.
• The Samsung Group mainly consists of three main companies – Samsung Electronics, Samsung Heavy Industries and Samsung C&T.
• These three companies, among a host of other minor companies, are considered as the three stars of this conglomerate and that is reflected in the name of the group.

Toshiba

• Toshiba is an amalgamation of two companies and there lies the root of its name.
• The first company was Shibaura Seisakusho, which was one of the major heavy electrical machinery manufacturer in early 20th century Japan that established Japan as a major world industrial power prior to the First World War.
• The second company was Tokyo Denki, which was into manufacturing electrical and consumer products.
• The two amalgamated in 1939 to create the new company Tokyo Shinbaura Denki, also soon coming to be known by the shorter and more convenient name Toshiba.
• Yet it was not until 1978 that the name Toshiba Corporation was officially adopted.

Hitachi

• The word Hitachi literally means sunrise in Japanese.
• Since Japan is known as the ‘land of the rising sun’, the name was adopted by the company to convey a sense of being in sync with the Japanese culture.

HotMail

• The founder of this company, Jack Smith, came up with the idea of accessing email via the web from a computer anywhere in the world without having the prevailing restrictive system of having to use the email server provided by the ISP.
• When the other founder, Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending with ‘mail’, and finally settled for Hotmail, as it included the letters “HTML”, which is Hyper Text Markup Language – the programming language used to write web pages.
• Launched on July 4, 1996, it was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing.

PanaSonic

• While this company adopted the name National in 1927, it marketed its audio equipment under the brand name PanaSonic.
• In May 2003, the company made Panasonic its global brand with the slogan Panasonic ideas for life.
• The company then slowly began the process of unifying its brands to Panasonic and by March 2004 replaced National for products and outdoor signboards completely, with the exception of those in Japan.
• Finally, on January 10, 2008, it was announced that it would change its name to Panasonic Corporation.
• The name change was approved by the shareholders on June 26, 2008.

Lenovo

• The company was originally named Legend, but they had to change it to Lenovo because it was already a registered trademark in the West.
• “Lenovo” is a blend of two words “Le” from Legend and “novo”, which is pseudo-Latin for new.

LG

• LG is a combination of two popular Korean brands Lucky (from Lak-Hui Chemical Industrial Corp, which was a plastics manufacturing company) and Goldstar (from Goldstar Co. Ltd., which was an electronics company).
• To be able to compete in the American market, this amalgamation of companies was named as LG in 1995, even though it has been popularly suggested by the company that it is associated with its tagline “Life’s Good”.

Akai

• The word “Akai” means the colour red in Japanese.
• As you may already know, Japan is known as the ‘land of the rising sun’, as it is the eastern-most country.
• The colour red is associated with that of the rising Sun as seen in the red round at the center of the Japanese flag.
• Akai was hence named so to convey that it is very much a Japanese company.