Now here’s a pretty cool site which names a load of companies and how they got their names, here’s a few of them:

Adobe- came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the houses of founders John Warnock and Chuck Geschke .

Apache- The name was chosen from respect for the Native American Indian tribe of Apache (Indé), well-known for their superior skills in warfare strategy and their inexhaustible endurance. Secondarily, and more popularly (though incorrectly) accepted, it’s considered a cute name that stuck: its founders got started by applying patches to code written for NCSA’s httpd daemon. The result was ‘a patchy’ server — thus the name Apache.

Hotmail– Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in ‘mail’ and finally settled for Hotmail as it included the letters “HTML” – the markup language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing. (If you click on Hotmail’s ‘mail’ tab, you will still find “HoTMaiL” in the URL.)

IBM- named by Tom Watson, an ex-employee of National Cash Register. To one-up them in all respects, he called his company International Business Machines.

Intel- Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore initially incorporated their company as N M Electronics. Someone suggested Moore Noyce Electronics but it sounded too close to “more noise” — not a good choice for an electronics company! Later, Integrated Electronics was proposed but it had been taken by somebody else. Then, using initial syllables from INTegrated ELectronics, Noyce and Moore came up with Intel. To avoid potential conflicts with other companies of similar names, Intel purchased the name rights for $15,000 from a company called Intelco. (Source: Intel 15 Years Corporate Anniversary Brochure)

McDonald’s- from the name of the brothers Dick McDonald and Mac McDonald, who founded the first McDonald ‘s restaurant in 1940.

Microsoft- coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the ‘-‘ was removed later on.

SEGA- “Service Games of Japan” (SeGa) Founded by Marty Bromley (an American) to import pinball games to Japanfor use on American military bases.

Tesco- Founder Jack Cohen, who from 1919 sold groceries in the markets of the London East End, acquired a large shipment of tea from T. E. Stockwell and made new labels by using the first three letters of the supplier’s name and the first two letters of his surname forming the word “TESCO”.

Yahoo!- a “backronym” for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle. 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 action and is barely human. Yahoo! founders David Filo and Jerry Yang selected the name because they jokingly considered themselves yahoos

Via: Day2Day Activities