Companies and Names

Wanted to share this article that i came across..
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adi
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ABN AMRO- In the 1960s, the Nederlandse Handelmaatschappij (Dutch Trading Society; 1824) and the

Twentsche Bank merged to form the Algemene Bank Nederland ( ABN; General Bank of the Netherlands). In 1966,the Amsterdamsche Bank and the Rotterdamsche Bank merged to form the Amro Bank. In 1991, ABN and Amro Bank merged to form ABN AMRO.

Accenture- Accent on the Future. Greater-than 'accent' over the logo's t points forward towards the
future. The name Accenture was proposed by a company employee in Norwayas part of a internal name finding process (BrandStorming). Prior to January 1, 2001 the company was called Andersen Consulting.

Adidas- from the name of the founder Adolf (Adi) Dassler.

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

AltaVista- Spanish for "high view".

Amazon. com - Founder Jeff Bezos renamed the company to Amazon (from the earlier name of Cadabra. com)
after the world's most voluminous river, the Amazon. He saw the potential for a larger volume of sales in an
online bookstore as opposed to the then prevalent bookstores. (Alternative: It is said that Jeff Bezos named
his book store Amazon simply to cash in on the popularity of Yahoo at the time. Yahoo listed entries
alphabetically, and thus Amazon would always appear above its competitors in the relevant categories it was
listed in.)

AMD- Advanced Micro Devices.
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 â€"
thus the name Apache.

Apple- for the favourite fruit of co-founder Steve Jobs and/or for the time he worked at an apple
orchard. He was three months late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company
Apple Computer if his colleagues didn't suggest a better name by 5 p.m. Apple's Macintosh is named after a
popular variety of apple sold in the US. Apple also wanted to distance itself from the cold, unapproachable,
complicated imagery created by the other computer companies at the time had names like IBM, NEC, DEC, ADPAC,Cincom, Dylakor, Input, Integral Systems, SAP, PSDI, Syncsort and Tesseract. The new company sought to reverse the entrenched view of computers in order to get people to use them at home. They looked for a name that was unlike the names of traditional computer companies, a name that also supported a brand positioning strategy that was to be perceived as simple, warm, human, approachable and different. Note: Apple had to get approval from the Beatle's Apple Corps to use the name 'Apple' and paid one-time royalty to
McIntosh Laboratory, Inc., a maker of high-end audio equipment, to use the derivative name 'Macintosh', known now as just 'Mac'.

AT&T- American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation officially changed its name to AT&T in the 1990s.

Bauknecht- Founded as an electrotechnical workshop in 1919 by Gottlob Bauknecht .

BBC- Stands for British Broadcasting Corporation.

BenQ- Bringing ENjoyment and Quality to life

Blaupunkt- Blaupunkt (Blue dot) was founded in 1923 under the name Ideal. Their core business was the
manufacturing of headphones. If the headphones came through quality tests, the company would give the
headphones a blue dot. The headphones quickly became known as the blue dots or blaue Punkte. The quality
symbol would become a trademark, and the trademark would become the company name in 1938.

BMW- abbreviation of Bayerische Motoren Werke (Bavarian Motor Factories)

Borealis - The Northern Lights or Aurora Borealis, is the celestial phenomenon that features bursts of
light in colourful patterns dancing across the night skies of the north. Borealis, inspired from the shining
brilliance of the Northern Lights, was formed in 1994 out of the merger between two northern oil companies,

Norway's Statoil and Finland's Neste.

BP - formerly British Petroleum, now "BP" (The slogan "Beyond Petroleum" has incorrectly been taken to
refer to the company's new name following its rebranding effort in 2000).

BRAC- abbreviation for Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, world's largest NGO (non governmental
organization). It works in development programs around the world.