Sep 3, 2006
Just a random call
Would Yahoo! have become the success it did if it had been called by another name?
By Frankie Chee
IF FATE had taken a different turn, or the wind blown a little harder while the coin was turning in the air, we could well be plugged into the Internet through Packard-Hewlett laptops today, rather than the more familiar Hewlett-Packard brand.
More than 60 years ago, Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett decided the name of their company by tossing a coin to decide whether it would be known as Hewlett-Packard or the other way round.
No prizes for guessing who won. And it isn't the only widely known brand whose name - now so familiar it's unthinkable that it could have been anything else - had a random origin.
Some company founders simply took characters or words found in novels, others used acronyms or played on words.
For example, Yahoo! founders David Filo and Jerry Yang based the name of their Internet services company on a term used in the classic book by Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels. It refers to someone who is repulsive in appearance and action.
Closer to home, the founders of fashion powerhouse Club21, Mr and Mrs Ong Beng Seng, chose the number because it is lucky when playing blackjack. Club22 just doesn't have the same ring, does it?
[email protected]How they got their names
LIFESTYLE tells you how some big companies - including those from Singapore - got their names.
AKIRA: Parent company TT International wanted to start its own house brand of consumer electronics and asked customers to suggest a five-letter word with a positive connotation.
TT International settled on Akira, as 'A' is the first letter in the alphabet, and the name represents brightness and morning sunshine in Japanese.
COURTS: The furniture giant was named after its founder, Henry Court.
CLUB21: The owners of the famous fashion name chose the number 21 for its reference to blackjack, taking a bet on its element of luck.
EU YAN SANG: The name of this company, which distributes traditional Chinese medicine products, is made up of founder Eu Kong's name and the words 'Yan' and 'Sang'. The former is a Cantonese word that means benevolent, kind or humane, while the latter represents birth, life or livelihood.
GOOGLE: A play on the word googol, which was popularised in a book called Mathematics And The Imagination. It refers to the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros.
IBM: Started off as International Time Recording Company, which became International Business Machines, a consolidation of three subsidiaries, the Computing Scale Company of America, Tabulating Machine Company and the International Time Rceording Company.
INTEL: Two guys called Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce incorporated N and M Electronics; the company later purchased the rights to use the name Intel from IntelCo and Intel (INTegrated ELectronics) Corporation was created.
MOTOROLA: Paul V. Galvin, the founder of the phone giant, created the brand by linking motor (for motorcar) with 'ola' (implying the sound).
Thus Motorola conveyed the idea of sound in motion.
NIKE: Founders Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight began Blue Ribbon Sports whose athletic footwear was called Nike, after the Greek winged goddess of victory.
OSIM: The 'O' represents founder Ron Sim's vision of building a global brand for his company, which makes massage chairs and distributes health products, while the rest comes from his family name.
STARBUCKS: Named after the first mate in Herman Melville's classic whale of a tale, Moby Dick.
YAHOO!: Started out as Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web. The final name Yahoo! is an acronym for 'Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle', but founders David Filo and Jerry Yang say they liked the general definition of a yahoo: 'rude, unsophisticated, uncouth', a term used by Jonathan Swift in his book, Gulliver's Travels.
Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, 'Akebono', while the software was lodged on Filo's computer, 'Konishiki' - both named after legendary sumo wrestlers.
77th STREET: The founder of this youth fashion chain, Elim Chew, regards seven as the number for perfection and completion because in the Bible, God completed creating the world in seven days.
She also says 77 goes well with 'street' and it is a place where everyday life takes place, and where creative ideas and dreams are born and take off.
and the 7th month!