Before registering a business, there’s likely to be an interim period where horns are locked, voices are raised and cups of coffee are spilled as you fight it out over your preferred business name. Looking back through the archives of time at some of the bigger company formations, it seems as if the experts have experienced similar problems as well…
Apple
The late, great Steve Jobs coined the ‘Apple’ name after growing frustrated at the lack of alternative ideas from his colleagues. Jobs subsequently threatened to name the company after one of his favourite fruits if a solution wasn’t found quickly. Nobody stepped forward, and Apple was registered as a business name soon afterwards.
Does anybody actually know what a ‘Google’ is? In mathematics, a ‘Googol’ is a number that represents the number one followed by 100 zeros. A Googol related to the amount of information (in bytes) that the world’s future favourite search engine could process around the time and the company founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, presented their ideas (and their proposed business name) to a series of investors. When one of the cheques came back, the word ‘Googol’ was misspelled and issued under the name of ‘Google’.
Yahoo
The bookworms amongst you may well have already absorbed the creativity of Jonathan Swift and his timeless Lilliputian classic, ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. In the literary masterpiece, Swift refers to a race of individuals knows as the ‘Yahoos’ and describes them as ugly, sub-human individuals lacking in social grace. In deference to their self-imposed computer geek status, David Filo and Jerry Yang adopted the ‘Yahoo’ term as a business name.
Hewlett-Packard
Somewhat sadly, there are no creative impulses behind the name of the popular computer peripherals company and the business name relates to the names of the founder members, Bill Hewlett and David Packard. Although the pair wanted to name the company after themselves, there was much deliberation over which name should be listed first. ‘Packard-Hewlett’ was avoided by the simple toss of a coin.
Lotus
Remember Lotus? Prior to the IBM buyout in 1995, Lotus was one of the biggest names in computing and the company was founded by Mitchell David Kapor. Kapor was an exponent and teacher in the Buddhist art of transcendental meditation. The Lotus Development Corporation was named after one of the most popular techniques in the discipline of yoga.
CISCO
Are you one of the many millions of electronics consumers who believe that CISCO is an acronym for some fancy, hi-tech phrase? In reality, the CISCO business name is little more than an abbreviation of the company birthplace (San Francisco) and this is one of the key reasons behind their original employees using lower-case letters on company documentation.
Corel
Noted for their popular creative software releases such as Corel Draw and Paint Shop Pro, Corel are another company that derived their business name from a founding member. The gentleman in question is Michael Cowpland and Corel actually represents the name of the ‘COwpland REsearch Laboratory’.