Story behind famous brand names

Google 
Googol misspelled as google
A googol is equivalent to a 1 followed by 100 zeros. When Larry Page and Sean Anderson came up with the name, Sean misspelled it as Google when seeing if the domain was available. Another report claims that Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and Google’s first investor, misspelled the name on his $100,000 investment check.


Microsoft 
Bill Gates named Microsoft from two words: “Microcomputer” and “Software”. In year 1975, Bill Gates wrote a letter to his colleague Paul Allen, he wrote as Micro-Soft. But in 1976 they registered the name Microsoft as a single name.

Cisco
Short for San Francisco where the company was founded.

Hotmail
Hotmail is based on HTML and the company wanted to give it a name that will sound like HTML and have the word “mail” at the end. They finally selected the name “HoTMaiL”, but later changed the word casing and made it “Hotmail”.

Adobe
Adobe is the name of a river. One of the founders of Adobe, John Nack, lives in Los Altas in California. This river runs behind his house. This is how Adobe got its name.

HP
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard 
Named after their founders, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. They tossed a coin to determine if the company would be named Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett. Packard won the coin toss but chose to leave it as Hewlett-Packard.

Skype
Originally Sky-Peer-to Peer, then Skyper, and finally Skype.

Verizon
A combination of the words veritas, the Latin word for truth, and horizon, signifying forward-looking and visionary.

Visa
Dee Hock, Visa’s founder, believed that the word would be instantly recognizable by many languages and universally accepted by many countries.

Yahoo! –Coined by Jonathan Swift in his book Gulliver’s Travels, a yahoo (short for yahooligan) is a repulsive, filthy creature.