Business Quiz - Origin of company names

• Adobe - came from name ofthe river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John Warnock.
• Apache -It got its name because its founders got started by applying patches to codewritten for NCSA’s httpd daemon. The result was ‘A PAtCHy’ server — thus, thename Apache.
• Apple - favourite fruit offounder Steve Jobs. He was three months late in filing a name for the business,and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if his colleagues didn’tsuggest a better name by 5pm. Apple’s Macintosh is named after a popular varietyof apple sold in the US.
• Canon - from Kwanon the Buddhist god of mercy. The name was changed to Canon to avoid offendingreligious groups.
• Casio - from the name of its founder,Kashio Tadao who had set up the company Kashio Seisakujo as a subcontractorfactory.
• Cisco - its not anacronymn but its the short for San Francisco.
• Compaq - using Comp, for computer, andpaq to denote a small integral object. Corel - from the founder’s name Dr.Michael Cowpland. It stands for COwplandREsearch Laboratory.
• Daewoo - the company founder Kim WooChong called it Daewoo which means "Great Universe" in Korean.
• Exxon - a name contrived by Esso(Standard Oil of New Jersey) in the early 70s to create a neutral but distinctive label for the company. Within days of announcement of the name,Exxon was being called the "double cross company " but this eventually subsided.
• Fergcorp - from the name of it’s founder, Andrew Ferguson. Ferguson liked the name OSCORP (fictional company name from Spiderman) and decided that Fergcorp had a nice ring to it. The name was originally capitalized as FergCorp in the last 90’s when the company was founded, but was later changed to Fergcorp.
• Fuji - from the highest Japanese mountainMount Fuji
• Google - the name started as a jokeyboast 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 1followed by 100 zeros. After founders - Stanford grad students Sergey Brin andLarry Page presented their project to an angel investor, they received a chequemade out to ‘Google’ !
• HP - Bill Hewlett and DavePackard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.
• Hitachi - stands for "sunrise" inJapanese.
• Honda - from the name of its founder,Soichiro Honda
• Honeywell - from the name ofMark Honeywell founder of Honeywell Heating Specialty Co. It later merged withMinneapolis Heat Regulator Company and was finally called Honeywell Inc. in1963.
• Hotmail - Founder Jack Smith got theidea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. WhenSabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried allkinds of names ending in ‘mail’ and finally settled for hotmail as it includedthe letters "html" - the markup language used to write web pages. It wasinitially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing.
• Hyundai - means "present time" inKorean.
• IBM - started by an ex employee of NationalCash Register. To one-up them in all respects he called his companyInternational Business Machines.
• Intel - Bob Noyce and Gordon Moorewanted to name their new company ‘Moore Noyce’ but that was already trademarkedby a hotel chain, so they had to settle for an acronym ofINTegrated ELectronics.
• Kawasaki - from the name of itsfounder, Shozo Kawasaki
• Kodak - Both the Kodak cameraand the name were the invention of founder George Eastman. The letter "K" was afavourite with Eastman; he felt it a strong and incisive letter. He tried outvarious combinations of words starting and ending with "K". He saw threeadvantages in the name. It had the merits of a trademark word, would not bemis-pronounced and the name did not resemble anything in the art. There is amisconception that the name was chosen because of its similarity to the soundproduced by the shutter of the camera.
• Konica - it was earlier known asKonishiroku Kogaku. Konishiroku in turn is the short for Konishiya Rokubeiten which was thefirst name of the company established by Rokusaburo Sugiura in the 1850s.
• LG - combination of two popular Korean brandsLucky and Goldstar.
• Lotus - 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.
• Microsoft - coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originallychristened Micro-Soft, the ‘-’ was removed later on.
• Mitsubishi - name coined byfounder Yataro Iwasaki in 1870. It means "three diamonds" in Japanese. The threediamonds also make up the company’s logo.
• Motorola - Founder Paul Galvincame up with this name when his company started manufacturing radios for carss.Many audio equiptment makers of the era used the "ola" ending for theirproducts, most famously the "Victrola" phonograph made by the Victor TalkingMachine Company.
• Mozilla Foundation -From the name of the web-browser that succeeded Netscape Navigator. When MarcAndreesen, founder of Netscape,created a browser to replace the Mosaic browser, it was internally named Mozilla(Mosaic-Killer, Godzilla).
• Nabisco - Formerly The NationalBiscuit Company, changed in 1971 to Nabisco.
• Nikon - the original name wasNippon Kogaku, meaning "Japanese Optical".
• Nintendo - Nintendo is composed of3 Japanese Kanji characters, Nin-ten-do which can be translated to "Heavenblesses hard work"
• Nissan - the company was earlier knownby the name Nichon Sangio which means"Japanese industry".
• Nokia - started as a wood-pulp mill, thecompany expanded into producing rubber products in the Finnish city of Nokia.The company later adopted the city’s name.
• Novell - Novell, Inc. wasearlier Novell Data Systems co-founded by George Canova. The name was suggestedby George’s wife who mistakenly thought that "Novell" meant "new" in French.
• Oracle - Larry Ellisonand Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the CIA (CentralIntelligence Agency). The code name for the project was called 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 Larry and Bob decided to finishwhat they started and bring it to the world. They kept the name Oracle andcreated the RDBMS engine. Later they kept the same name for the company.
• Red Hat - Company founder MarcEwing was given the Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes) whileat college by his grandfather. People would turn to him to solve their problems,and he was referred to as ‘that guy in the red hat’. He lost the cap and had tosearch for it desperately. The manual of the beta version of Red Hat Linux hadan appeal to readers to return his Red Hat if found by anyone.
• Sanyo - The Japanese translation is disputed,although the Chinese name is "三洋" (literally, "Three Oceans")
• SAP - "Systems, Applications,Productss in Data Processing", formed by 4 ex-IBM employees who used to work inthe ‘Systems/Applications/Projects’ group of IBM.
• SCO - from Santa Cruz Operation. The company’s office was in Santa Cruz, California. It became the eventually licensor for Unix (via Unix Systems Labs and then Novell), andeventually went bankrupt. The assets were purchased by Caldera Inc (itself aspin off of Novell) and Caldera changed its own name back to SCO. It is this SCOwhich has sued IBM and others, asserting its ownership of the copyright to Unixsource code.
• Siemens - founded in 1847 byWerner von Siemens.
• Sony - from the Latin word ’sonus’ meaningsound, and ’sonny’ a slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.
• Subaru - from the Japanese name forthe star cluster known to Westerners as Pleiades or the Seven Sisters. This starcluster features on the company’s logo.
• SUN - founded by 4 StanfordUniversity buddies, SUN is the acronym for Stanford University Network.
• Suzuki - from the name of its founder,Michio Suzuki
• Tesco - Founder Jack Cohen, who from1919 sold groceries in the markets of the London East End, acquired a largeshipment of tea from T. E. Stockwell and made new labels by using the firstthree letters of the supplier’s name and the first two letters of his surnameforming the word "TESCO".
• Toshiba - was founded by the mergerof consumer goods company Tokyo Denki (Tokyo Electric Co) andelectrical firm Shibaura Seisaku-sho (Shibaura EngineeringWorks).
• Toyota - from the founder’s nameSakichi Toyoda. Initially called Toyeda, it was changed after a contest for abetter-sounding name. The new name was written in eight Japanese letters, anumber that is considered lucky in Japan.
• Xerox - The inventor, Chestor Carlson,named his product trying to say `dry’ (as it was dry copying, markedly differentfrom the then prevailing wet copying). The Greek root `xer’ means dry.
• Yahoo - the word was invented byJonathan Swift and used in his book Gulliver’s Travels. It represents aperson who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo!founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they consideredthemselves yahoos. However, Yahoo! today claims a sort of backformed acronym —Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.
• 3M - Minnesota Mining and ManufacturingCompany started off by mining the material corundum used to make sandpaper.