Ref: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124931971543002029.html
Most of us spend a lot of time staring at a computer or TV screen, playing video games, or gabbing into our cell phones. The brand names for these products are all familiar, but where did they come from in the first place? Just what is a Nokia? Here's a look at the origins of some of your favorite tech and gadget companies' names.
1. Kodak: Founder George Eastman named the camera and film corporation in 1888. Eastman wanted a short name that was easy to pronounce and could only refer to his products. He later said that he favored the letter "k" because it "seems a strong, incisive sort of letter." Once Eastman decided he wanted the name to start and end with "k," he played around with combinations of letters until he found one that he liked in "Kodak."
2. Nintendo: Nintendo's name translates into English as "leave luck to heaven." The name made more sense before Nintendo got into the video game business; it opened in 1889 to make hanafuda cards, a type of Japanese playing cards decorated with floral designs.
3. Sony: When Sony got its start in 1946, it had a decidedly less catchy name – Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo. Within a few years, the company's founders wanted a new name, so they combined sonus, Latin for "sound," with "Sonny," the term of endearment for a young boy. The newly coined word captured both the superior sound quality and small size the company was shooting for with its products.
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4. Sega: Sega got its start in Hawaii in 1940 as Standard Games, a business that provided military bases with pinball machines to help amuse soldiers. In 1951, the company moved to Tokyo and renamed itself "Service Games" to reflect its business of importing coin-op machines for American military bases. In 1965, Service Games merged with another coin-op company, Rosen Enterprises, and shortened its name to Sega.
5. Nokia: The modern telecom giant hasn't always been involved in such tech-heavy fields. The company got its start in Tampere, Finland, in 1865 as a pulp mill and paper manufacturer. When owner Fredrik Idestam opened a second plant in Nokia, Finland, in 1868, he decided the town's name would suit his company, too.
The town takes its name from the Nokianvirta River that flows through it, which in turn takes its name from an archaic Finnish word referring to the small furry animals, mostly sables, which lived on the river's banks.
Associated Press
A player at the 1981 ATARI International Asteroids Tournament.
6. Cisco Systems: The recent addition to the Dow Jones Industrial Average takes its name from San Francisco, where it was founded in 1984.
7. Atari: The video-game pioneer takes its name the board game Go. In Go, atari is a term that indicates that a player's stone (or group of a player's stones) are in immediate danger of being captured by the player's opponent.
8. Toshiba: Toshiba formed following the 1939 merger of consumer products company Tokyo Denki with machinery firm Shibaura Seisakusho. By taking the "To" from the former and the "Shiba" from the latter, a new company name was born.
9. Sanyo: Sanyo's name means "three oceans" in Japanese; the company's founder wanted to sell his wares across the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific oceans to reach the entire world.
10. Seiko: The watchmaker takes its name from a Japanese word meaning "exquisite" or "success."
11. Canon: When Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory started developing Japan's first-ever 35mm camera equipped with a focal plane shutter, the engineers dubbed the creation "Kwanon" after the Buddhist goddess of mercy. At this point the company's logo even included the thousand-armed goddess.
When the camera was ready to roll out worldwide in 1935, the company decided to tweak the name to "Canon" so it would be easier for international markets to accept.
12. Sharp: The electronics manufacturer got its start in 1912 as metalsmith Tokuji Hayakawa's personal outlet for his inventions, including a specialized snap buckle. In 1915 Hayakawa invented an improved mechanical pencil he dubbed Ever-Sharp, and to honor the fine point of his creation, Hayakawa started calling his company "Sharp."
Associated Press
The Motorola Micro TAC personal telephone, which was unveiled during a news conference in April 1989.
13. Magnavox: The stalwart electronics company began in 1915 when Edwin Pridham and Peter Jensen created a moving-coil loudspeaker, which they named "Magnavox," Latin for "great voice."
14. Coleco: The video game kingpins of the 1970s and 80s (and the people who brought you Cabbage Patch Dolls!), Coleco was originally a company that sold shoe leather. The name Coleco is a shortening of "Connecticut Leather Company."
15. Motorola: Founder Paul Galvin named his company in a twist on the old naming convention of putting "-ola" at the end of phonograph and radio names like the Victrola. Since Galvin and his company were making car radios, he merged "motor" with "-ola" to get the name.
16. Samsung: Samsung got its start in 1938 when Lee Byung-Chull started the "Samsung Store" in Korea. The store initially focused on exporting dried fish and fruit, but it jumped into electronics in the 1960s. The name Samsung is Korean for "three stars," a nod to the lucky properties of the number three.
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Showing posts with label Companies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Companies. Show all posts
Did You Know How These Names Came About!
Did You Know How These Names Came About!
Ref: http://www.jaxey.com
Adobe - came from name of the 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 code written for NCSA's httpd daemon. The result was 'A PAtCHy' server -- thus, the name Apache
Apple Computers - favourite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was three months late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn't suggest a better name by 5 o'clock.
C - Dennis Ritchie improved on the B programming language and called it 'New B'. He later called it C. Earlier B was created by Ken Thompson as a revision of the Bon programming language (named after his wife Bonnie)
CISCO - its not an acronymn but the short for San Francisco.
Compaq - using COMp, for computer, and PAQ to denote a small integral object.
GNU - a species of African antelope. Founder of the GNU project Richard Stallman liked the name because of the humour associated with its pronuniciation and was also influenced by the children's song 'The Gnu Song' which is a song sung by a gnu. Also it fitted into the recursive acronym culture with 'GNU's Not Unix'.
Google - the name started as a jokey boast 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 1 followed by 100 zeros. After founders - Stanford grad students Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor, they received a cheque made out to 'Google'!
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 programming language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing.
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 wanted to name their new company 'Moore Noyce' but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain, so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.
Java - Originally called Oak by creator James Gosling, from the tree that stood outside his window, the programming team had to look for a substitute as there was another language with the same name. Java was selected from a list of suggestions. It came from the name of the coffee that the programmers drank.
Ref: http://www.jaxey.com
Adobe - came from name of the 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 code written for NCSA's httpd daemon. The result was 'A PAtCHy' server -- thus, the name Apache
Apple Computers - favourite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was three months late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn't suggest a better name by 5 o'clock.
C - Dennis Ritchie improved on the B programming language and called it 'New B'. He later called it C. Earlier B was created by Ken Thompson as a revision of the Bon programming language (named after his wife Bonnie)
CISCO - its not an acronymn but the short for San Francisco.
Compaq - using COMp, for computer, and PAQ to denote a small integral object.
GNU - a species of African antelope. Founder of the GNU project Richard Stallman liked the name because of the humour associated with its pronuniciation and was also influenced by the children's song 'The Gnu Song' which is a song sung by a gnu. Also it fitted into the recursive acronym culture with 'GNU's Not Unix'.
Google - the name started as a jokey boast 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 1 followed by 100 zeros. After founders - Stanford grad students Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor, they received a cheque made out to 'Google'!
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 programming language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing.
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 wanted to name their new company 'Moore Noyce' but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain, so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.
Java - Originally called Oak by creator James Gosling, from the tree that stood outside his window, the programming team had to look for a substitute as there was another language with the same name. Java was selected from a list of suggestions. It came from the name of the coffee that the programmers drank.
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