Ever wonder how companies come up their names? This series on Stock Market Blog will feature stories behind company names. Hopefully you all will find in interesting.
Adobe ? from the name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the houses of founders John Warnock and Chuck Geschke.
Akamai ? Hawaiian for ?clever, intelligent and cool.?
Amazon.com ? founder Jeff Bezos renamed the company 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 (as opposed to a bricks and mortar) bookstore.
Apple ? After volleying names back and forth with Wozniak for hours, Jobs looked at the apple he was eating and decided that, unless he or Wozniak arrived at something better by five o?clock, they would call the company Apple. Five o?clock came and went, Apple was the new company?s name.
Cisco ? short for San Francisco. It has also been suggested that it was ?CIS-co?: Computer Information Services was the department at Stanford University where the founders worked.
eBay ? Pierre Omidyar, who had created the Auction Web trading website, had formed a web consulting company called Echo Bay Technology Group. Echo Bay Mines Limited, a gold mining company, had already taken EchoBay.com, so Omidyar registered what he thought was the second best name, eBay.com.
Garmin ? named after its founders, Gary Burrell and Dr. Min Kao.
Google ? a deliberate misspelling of the word googol (def: The number 10 raised to the power 100 (10 100, written out as the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros., an extremely large number), 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.
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 already been taken, so they used the initial syllables (INTegrated ELectronics).
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?. It became so widely recognized that the company later adopted it as the company name.