Origin of company names

[Professor James]

List some interesting origin stories of company names.

Nike inc. is named after the greek goddess of victory [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_%28mythology%29]

Nintendo roughly translates to "leave luck in heaven"

Sony is derived from the latin word "sonus" meaning sound and the slang term "sonny" meaning young man.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I liked Clover Studio's. Clover = creativity lover. Apparently, clover translates to Japanese as "miba", which in turn stands of (kinda) for Shinji Mikami and Atsushi Inaba - the heads of Clover. Clover, of course, was a development studio owned by Capcom (from "capsule computers"). On an unrelated note, Nintendo means "leave luck to the gods/kami" in Japanese.

 

[randmonds4]

They will never suspect...

 

[Mocmocman]

I've always found recursive acronyms to be cool:
(Some from Wikipedia)
GNU ? GNU's Not Unix
BWIA ? BWIA West Indies Airways (formerly British West Indian Airways)
CAVE ? Cave Automatic Virtual Environment

Really I don't know much about the origins of the names of companies, so this looks to be an interesting and funducational thread!

 

[Auron225]

HMV - His Master's Voice

The logo is a dog looking into a gramophone...

Spoiler

This dog existed - it was called Nipper. When his owner (Mark Barraud) died, the owner's brother (an artist named Francis Barraud) inherited him along with a phonograph and some recordings of Marks voice. The dog was bewildered and curious to hear, as it was described, "his master's voice" coming from elsewhere. Francis painted the scene;

Spoiler

and eventually sold it to the Gramophone Company, who made it their logo and later became known as HMV.

 

[Aeshi]

Apple chose their name because it meant that alphabetically, they came before all their competitors like Atari.

Likewise the Apple Macintosh is named after the species of Apple known as the "McIntosh Red"

 

[thespyisdead]

Nokia is a town in Finland
Fiskars is also a name of a town in Finland
Finlayson, however, is not a town name but the name of a Scottish engineer who decided to go to Finland and start a company

 

[Angie7F]

Volkswagen

Volkswagen literally means ?people?s car.? Adolf Hitler initially came up with the idea for ?cars for the masses,? which would be a state-sponsored Volkswagen program. Hitler wanted to create a more affordable car that was able to transport two adults and three children at speeds of 62 mph. He choose the car manufacturer Porsche to carry out the project, and the rest, as they say, is history.

 

[CrazyJew]

Well, EA's Origin... the origin of the name Origin is the company Origin which was one of EA's first victims.

 

[Smertnik]

BioWare stole the name from a packaging company.
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/39164/10-07-11_1129.jpg

 

[Scarim Coral]

The toy company "Lego" is from the Danish word "leg godt" which translate to "play well". However Ole Kirk unintentionally didn't know that Lego in Latin also means "I study" or "I put together".

How awesome is that by putting a double meaning to the company name?

 

[SadakoMoose]

HAL, is one step ahead of IBM. On the alphabet.
International Business Machines is better than "National Cash Register Company", where one of it's founders came from.