(...and does it really matter if it is a good story?)
In undertaking some research into Corporate Learning Academies and Corporate Universities
http://www.ecuanet.info/ I found some interesting material about how companies were named and what their names actually mean, take a look below..btw it is quite a long list!
ABN AMRO — In the 1960s, the Nederlandse Handelmaatschappij (Dutch Trading Society; 1824) and the Twentsche Bank merged to form the Algemene Bank Nederland ( ABN; General Bank of the Netherlands). In 1966, the Amsterdamsche Bank and the Rotterdamsche Bank merged to form the Amro Bank. In 1991, ABNand Amro Bank merged to form ABN AMRO.
Acccenture — Accent on the Future. Greater-than 'accent' over the logo's t points forward towards the future. The name Accenture was proposed by a company employee in Norways part of a internal name finding process (BrandStorming). Prior to January 1, 2001 the company was called Andersen Consulting.
Adidas — from the name of the founder Adolf (Adi) Dassler.
Adobe — came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the houses of founders John Warnock and Chuck Geschke .
AltaVista — Spanish for "high view".
Amazon.com — Founder Jeff Bezos renamed the company to Amazon (from the earlier name of Cadabra.com) after the world's most voluminous river, the Amazon. He saw the potential for a larger volume of sales in an online bookstore as opposed to the then prevalent bookstores. (Alternative: It is said that Jeff Bezos named his book store Amazon simply to cash in on the popularity of Yahoo at the time. Yahoo listed entries alphabetically, and thus Amazon would always appear above its competitors in the relevant categories it was listed in.)
Apple — for the favourite 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 his company Apple Computer if his colleagues didn't suggest a better name by 5 p.m. Apple's Macintosh is named after a popular variety of apple sold in the US. Apple also wanted to distance itself from the cold, unapproachable, complicated imagery created by the other computer companies at the time had names like IBM, NEC, DEC, ADPAC, Cincom, Dylakor, Input, Integral Systems, SAP, PSDI, Syncsort and Tesseract. The new company sought to reverse the entrenched view of computers in order to get people to use them at home. They looked for a name that was unlike the names of traditional computer companies, a name that also supported a brand positioning strategy that was to be perceived as simple, warm, human, approachable and different. Note: 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', known now as just 'Mac'.
Blaupunkt — Blaupunkt (Blue dot) was founded in 1923 under the name Ideal. Their core business was the manufacturing of headphones. If the headphones came through quality tests, the company would give the headphones a blue dot. The headphones quickly became known as the blue dots or blaue Punkte. The quality symbol would become a trademark, and the trademark would become the company name in 1938.
Cadillac — Cadillac was named after the 18th century French explorer Antoine Laumet de La Mothe , sieur de Cadillac, founder of Detroit, Michigan. Cadillac is a small town in the South of France.
Canon — Originally (1933) Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory the new name (1935) derived from the name of the company's first camera, the Kwannon, in turn named after the Japanese name of the Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy.
Cisco — short for San Francisco. It has also been suggested that it was "CIS-co" -- Computer Information Services was the department at Stanford University that the founders worked in.
Coca-Cola — Coca-Cola's name is derived from the coca leaves and kola nuts used as flavouring. Coca-Cola creator John S. Pemberton changed the 'K' of kola to 'C' for the name to look better.
Colgate-Palmolive — formed from a merger of soap manufacturers Colgate & Company and Palmolive-Peet. Peet was dropped in 1953. Colgate was named after William Colgate, an English immigrant, who set up a starch, soap and candle business in New York Cityin 1806. Palmolive was named for the two oils (Palm and Olive) used in its manufacture.
Compaq — from "comp" for computer, and "pack" to denote a small integral object; or: Compatibility And Quality; or: from the company's first product, the very compact Compaq Portable.
Daewoo — the company founder Kim Woo Chong called it Daewoo which means "Great Universe" in Korean.
Dell — named after its founder, Michael Dell. The company changed its name from Dell Computer in 2003.
DHL — the company was founded by Adrian Dalsey, Larry Hillblom , and Robert Lynn , whose last initials form the company's moniker.
eBay — Pierre Omidyar, who had created the Auction Web trading website, had formed a web consulting concern called Echo Bay Technology Group. " EchoBay" didn't refer to the town in Nevada, the nature area close to Lake Mead, or any real place. "It just sounded cool," Omidyar reportedly said. When he tried to register EchoBay.com, though, he found that Echo Bay Mines, a gold mining company, had gotten it first. So, Omidyar registered what (at the time) he thought was the second best name: eBay.com.
Epson — Epson Seiko Corporation, the Japanese printer and peripheral manufacturer, was named from "Son of Electronic Printer"
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 by products 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.
Fiat — acronym of Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino (Italian Factory of Cars of Turin).
Fuji — from the highest Japanese mountain Mount Fuji.
Google — the name is an intentional misspelling of the word googol, reflecting the company's mission to organize the immense amount of information available online.
HP — Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.
Hitachi — old place name, literally "sunrise"
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 markup language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing. (If you click on Hotmail's 'mail' tab, you will still find "HoTMaiL" in the URL.)
Hyundai — connotes the sense of "the present age" or "modernity" in Korean.
IBM — named by Tom Watson, an ex-employee of National Cash Register. To one-up them in all respects, he called his company International Business Machines.
ICL — abbreviation for International Computers Ltd, once the UK's largest computer company, but now a service arm of Fujitsu, of Japan.
IKON — copier company name derived from I Know One Name.
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. Then, using initial syllables from INTegrated ELectronics, Noyce and Moore came up with Intel. To avoid potential conflicts with other companies of similar names, Intel purchased the name rights for $15,000 from a company called Intelco. (Source: Intel 15 Years Corporate Anniversary Brochure)
Kodak — Both the Kodak camera and the name were the invention of founder George Eastman . The letter "K" was a favourite with Eastman; he felt it a strong and incisive letter. He tried out various combinations of words starting and ending with "K". He saw three advantages in the name. It had the merits of a trademark word, would not be mis-pronounced and the name did not resemble anything in the art. There is a misconception that the name was chosen because of its similarity to the sound produced by the shutter of the camera.
Konica — it was earlier known as Konishiroku Kogaku. Konishiroku in turn is the short for Konishiya Rokubeiten which was the first name of the company established by Rokusaburo Sugiura in the 1850s.
Lotus Software — Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from 'The Lotus Position' or 'Padmasana'. Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation technique as taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Lycos — from Lycosidae, the family of wolf spiders
Mazda Motor — from the company's first president, Jujiro Matsuda . In Japanese, no syllables are ever stressed and some inner syllables are virtually skipped. Thus, Matsuda is pronounced "Matsda". To make the name fly better outside of Japan, the spelling was changed to Mazda.
McDonald's — from the name of the brothers Dick McDonald and Mac McDonald, who founded the first McDonald 's restaurant in 1940.Mercedes — This is the first name of the daughter of Emil Jellinek, who worked for the early Daimler company around 1900.
MGM — Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was formed by the merger of three picture houses Metro Picture Corporation, Goldwyn Pictures Corporation and Louis B. Mayer Pictures. Goldwyn Picture Corporation in turn was named after the last names of Samuel Goldfish and Edgar and Archibald Selwyn.
Microsoft — coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the '-' was removed later on.
Mitsubishi — The name Mitsubishi (??) has two parts: mitsu means three and hishi (changing to bishi in the middle of the word) means water chestnut, and from here rhombus, which is reflected in the company's logo.
Motorola — Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company (at the time, Galvin Manufacturing Company) started manufacturing radios for cars. Many audio equipment makers of the era used the " ola" ending for their products, most famously the "Victrola" phonograph made by the Victor Talking Machine Company. The name was meant to convey the idea of "sound" and "motion". The name became so recognized that the company later adopted it as the company name
Mozilla Foundation — from the name of the web-browser that preceded Netscape Navigator. When Marc Andreesen , founder of Netscape, created a browser to replace the Mosaic browser, it was internally named Mozilla (Mosaic-Killer, Godzilla) by Jamie Zawinski.
Netscape — named by first marketing employee Greg Sands, in a panic when the University of Illinois threatened to sue the new company for its original name, Mosaic. Netscape then paid Landor $50,000 to design a logo
Nike — named for the Greek goddess of victory.
Nikon — the original name was Nippon Kogaku, meaning "Japanese Optical".
Nissan — the company was earlier known by the name Nippon Sangyo which means "Japanese industry".
Nokia — started as a wood-pulp mill, the company expanded into producing rubber products in the Finnish city of Nokia. The company later adopted the city's name.
Nortel — The Nortel Networks name came from Nortel (Northern Telecom) and Bay Networks. The company was originally spun off from the Bell Telephone Company of Canada Ltd in 1895 as Northern Electric and Manufacturing, and traded as Northern Electric from 1914 to 1976.
Oracle — Larry Ellison, Ed Oates and Bob Miner were working on a consulting project for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The code name for the project was Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to give answers to all questions or some such). The project was designed to help use the newly written SQL database language from IBM. The project eventually was terminated but they decided to finish what they started and bring it to the world. They kept the name Oracle and created the RDBMS engine. Later they changed the name of the company, Relational Technology Inc, to the name of the product.
Pepsi — Pepsi derives its name from (treatment of) dyspepsia, an intestinal ailment.
Reebok — another spelling of rhebok (Pelea capreolus), an African antelope.
SAAB — founded in 1937 in Swedenas "Svenska Aeroplan aktiebolaget" (Swedish Aeroplane Company) abbreviated SAAB.
SAP — "Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing", formerly "SystemAnalyse und Programmentwicklung" (German for "System analysis and program development"), formed by 4 ex- IBM employees who used to work in the 'Systems/Applications/Projects' group of IBM.
Shell — Royal Dutch Shell was established in 1907, when the Royal Netherlands Petrol Society Plc. and the Shell Transport and Trading Company Ltd. merged. The Shell Transport and Trading Company Ltd. had been established at the end of the 19th century, by commercial firm Samuel & Co (founded in 1830). Samuel & Co were already successfully importing Japanese shells when they set up an oil company, so the oil company was named after the shells Samuel & Co were importing.
Siemens — founded in 1847 by Werner von Siemens and Johann Georg Halske: the company was originally called Telegraphen-Bau-Anstalt von Siemens & Halske.
Tesco — Founder Jack Cohen, who from 1919 sold groceries in the markets of the London East End, acquired a large shipment of tea from T. E. Stockwell and made new labels by using the first three letters of the supplier's name and the first two letters of his surname forming the word "TESCO".
Vodafone — is a multinational mobile phone operator with headquarters in the United Kingdom. Its name is made up of VOice, DAta, TeleFONE. Vodafone made the UK's first mobile call at a few minutes past midnight on the 1 January 1985.
Xerox — The inventor, Chestor Carlson, named his product trying to say `dry' (as it was dry copying, markedly different from the then prevailing wet copying). The Greek root `xer' means dry.
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.
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