* Accenture – from “Accent on the future”. The name Accenture was proposed by a company employee in Norway as part of an internal name finding process (BrandStorming).
* Adecco – named from the merger of Swiss staffing company Adia with French staffing company Ecco.
* Adidas – from the name of the founder Adolf (Adi) Dassler.
* Adobe Systems – from the Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of co-founder John Warnock.
* AltaVista – Spanish for “high view”.
* Apache – according to the project’s 1997 FAQ: “The Apache group was formed around a number of people who provided patch files that had been written for NCSA httpd 1.3. The result after combining them was A PAtCHy server.
* Apple – For the favorite fruit of co-founder Steve Jobs and/or for the time he worked at an apple orchard, and to distance itself from the cold, unapproachable, complicated imagery created by other computer companies at the time – which had names such as IBM, DEC, and Cincom
* BenQ – Bringing Enjoyment and Quality to life.
* Blaupunkt – Blaupunkt (“Blue dot”) was founded in 1923 under the name ”Ideal”. Its 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.
* Bose Corporation – named after founder Amar Bose.
* Bridgestone – named after founder Shojiro Ishibashi. The surname Ishibashi (石橋) means “stone bridge”, or “bridge of stone”.
* Cisco The name is not an acronym but an abbreviation of San Francisco. The company’s logo reflects its San Francisco name heritage. It represents a stylized Golden Gate Bridge.
*Compaq – from 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.
* eBay – Pierre Omidyar, who had created the Auction Web trading website, had formed a web consulting concern called Echo Bay Technology Group. “Echo Bay” didn’t refer to the town in Nevada, “It just sounded cool”, Omidyar reportedly said. Echo Bay Mines Limited, a gold mining company, had already taken EchoBay.com, so Omidyar registered what (at the time) he thought was the second best name: eBay.com.
*Google The name started as a jockey 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 graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor, they received a cheque made out to ‘Google
* Facebook – name stems from the colloquial name of books given to newly enrolled students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the US with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better.
* HP – Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.
* Mozilla Foundation – from the name of the web browser that preceded Netscape Navigator. When Marc Andreesen, co-founder of Netscape, created a browser to replace the Mosaic browser, it was internally named Mozilla (Mosaic-Killer, Godzilla) by Jamie Zawinski.
* 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.
* Red Hat – while at college, company founder Marc Ewing was given the Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes) by his grandfather. People would turn to him to solve their problems and he was referred to as that guy in the red hat. By the time he wrote the manual of the beta version of Red Hat Linux he had lost the cap, so the manual included an appeal to readers to return his Red Hat if found.
* Reebok – alternate spelling of rhebok (Pelea capreolus), an African antelope.
* Virgin – founder Richard Branson started a magazine called Student while still at school. In his autobiography, Losing My Virginity, Branson says that when they were starting a business to sell records by mail order, “one of the girls suggested: ‘What about Virgin? We’re complete virgins at business.’”
* Xerox – named from xerography, a word derived from the Greek xeros (dry) and graphos (writing). The company was founded as The Haloid Company in 1906, launched its first XeroX copier in 1949, and changed its name to Haloid Xerox in 1958.
* Yahoo! – 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 and barely human. Yahoo! founders David Filo and Jerry Yang jokingly considered themselves yahoos. It’s also an interjection sometimes associated with United States Southerners’ and Westerners’ expression of joy, as alluded to in Yahoo.com commercials that end with someone singing the word ”yahoo”. It is also sometime jokingly referred to by its backronym, Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.
* Zend Technologies – a contraction derived from the names of Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, the two founders.
Source: Wikipedia
