They are names you see on a regular basis, but do you actually know how the founders came up with their company names?

Adobe

Founder John Warnock named his company after the Adobe Creek which ran behind his house.

Apache

Apache’s founders started out by applying patches to NCSA’s httpd demon. They name it “A Patchy” server and Apache was born.

Apple

Apple was the favourite fruit of Steve Jobs. He was 3 months late in filing a name for his company and told his colleagues he would call his company Apple Computers if they did not come up with a better name before the end of the day.

Cisco

Cisco is actually ‘San Francisco’ in shortened format. Cisco’s logo is meant to be a stylized picture of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Google

Google’s name started out as a joke. A googol is the number 1 followed by 100 zeros and the founders jokingly boasted that this was the amount of information their new search engine would be able to search. When they were presented with a cheque from their business angel, the cheque was made out to ‘Google’ by accident, and the company name was born.

Hewlett-Packard

No prizes for guessing the origins of this company name given the co-founders were named Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. They flipped a coin at inception to decide whether to name the company Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.

Hotmail

Founder Jack Smith had a hard time coming up with a name for his business. He eventually settled on Hotmail partly because the name ended in ‘mail’ and partly because it included the letters ‘html’, the programming language of web pages. Initially, the product was referred to as HoTMaiL.

Intel

Co-founders Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore had intended to name their company ‘Moore Noyce’ however a hotel chain had already trademarked the name. Instead, the duo had to settle for an acronym – ‘INTegrated ELectronics’.

Lotus

Mitch Kapor was a teacher at the Transcendental Meditation of Mahesh Yogi. He got the idea for his company name from ‘padmasana’, better known as the lotus position.

Microsoft

This was originally an acronym – MICROcomputer SOFTware. The company was originally known as Micro-Soft, however the dash later got removed.

Motorola

The popular radio company around in Paul Galvin’s time was Victrola. Galvin took inspiration from this when his company started to manufacture radios for cars and named his company Motorola.

Red Hat

Marc Ewing was given the Cornell lacross team cap by his grandfather when he was at college. The cap was red with white stripes. He lost it and never found it again. If you find a copy of beta version manual, there is an appeal to users to return his Red Hat if they find it.

SAP

SAP was founded by four of IBM’s ex-employess who worked in the Systems/Applications/Projects group.

SONY

The latin word for sound is ’sonus’. ‘Sonny’ is a slang word used by Americans to denote a bright child. These two words were merged to form SONY.

SUN Microsystems

Sun was founded by four Stanford University friends. Sun is just the acronym for Stanford University Network.

Xerox

At the time, Chestor Carlson’s product for dry copying was markedly different from wet copying, which was the norm at the time. He took inspiration from the Greek prefix ‘xer’, meaning dry to come up with his company name.

Yahoo!

There are two stories surrounding Yahoo! The actual word was first used in the book, Gulliver’s Travels and was meant to describe a person who was repulsive in appearance, rude and uncouth. Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they felt that they were Yahoos. Yahoo! is also said to be an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchcal Officious Oracle.

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