Translated material
16 companies with the strangest names
Author: Gennady Zavolokin
Why Hulu doesn't mean something obscene and Zynga isn't a disease caused by a severe lack of vitamin C.
Alison Schontel from Business Insider published a selection of companies with the most unusual names and their explanations.
There was also a place in the ranking for a representative of Russia. No, not this one.
One King Lane
The name of the online home decor store was based on a fictitious address. There is no such street.
Etsy
The name of the online store selling vintage goods means “Oh yes!” in Italian.
Robert Kalin, the creator of the service, heard this word while watching the movie “Eight and a Half” and was able to make a brand out of it.
Yandex
Yet Another iNDEXer. The Latin-specific “I” replaced the diphthong YA in the abbreviation.
GoDaddy
Bob Parsons founded Jomax Technologies in 1997. Later they came up with a more catchy name, BigDaddy, but the domain was already taken. By the way, this company makes money by selling domains.
I mean witch. Still, they were burned in batches at one time...
The word twitter turned out to be the ideal option. Twitter, Twitter.
Zynga
The online gaming company was named after the dog of Mark Pincus, one of the founders.
And who is the dog named after?
This name was created by editing the mathematical term googol, which means one hundred zeros after one.
Yahoo
Jerry Yang and David Philo thought and thought, and renamed the company “Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web” in 1994. Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle - that’s what the world-famous abbreviation means, adapted from the name of the unpleasant creatures “Yahoo” from Jonathan Swift’s novel “Gulliver’s Travels” (yes, he didn’t only go to Lilliputians!)
Skype
Also an abbreviation for “Sky peer-to-peer” – the original name of the company. It is true. Imagine, “write to me on Skype in the evening.”
Apple
Everything is more or less clear here. From the memoirs of Steve Wozniak: “Jobs once said: “I have a great idea: Apple Computers.” <…> I never asked. Maybe it had some special meaning for him.”
Oh, no, it's not clear. According to Wozniak, the fruity name could have been borrowed from Apple Records, since Jobs, like all techies, was a connoisseur of good music.
And we are used to believing the legend about the first word in the telephone directory before Atari.
Pandora
The Greek goddess who opened the box with all the troubles was, in fact, terribly curious and inquisitive. Not a bitch at all, as is commonly believed, but a very gifted person - in the literal sense. This is what attracted the creators of Pandora Internet radio.
Hulu
There is nothing scary or vulgar in this word, although the Slavic ear grates a little. It means “pumpkin” in Mandarin Chinese. And also “interactive recording”. Well, yes. And in Russian it’s almost a homonym.
As in most cases, according to Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, choosing a name was preceded by a lengthy brainstorming session. In the end, having seemingly exhausted all the interesting options, the company’s employees decided to settle on hulu, because this word absorbed two such different and interesting meanings.
Meebo
The name of the quick messaging service did not carry much meaning (it did not, because Google bought the project and made it part of its corporation).
“As far as we know, this doesn’t translate at all. It's an acronym, a play on words, a joke." The founders of the project, Sandy Jen, Seth Stenberg and Elaine Wherry, were looking for an easy-to-hear name that could be easily written down and printed on paper without errors.
They even typed all the options into the browser until they found the most melodious sounding one.
Bebo
The name of this social network is an acronym for “blog early, blog often.” The motto of my whole life is simple.
Zillow
There are also some witty abbreviations here: zillion + pillow = awesome number of pillows.
Funny name for a real estate website, huh? It’s just that a pillow is an integral part of your cozy nest. Like a fireplace or radiator.
Yipit
Service co-founder Vinicius Vacanti: “At one point you realize that ABSOLUTELY ALL suitable names have been sorted out. We had this list of idiotic names: streetcake, frankencity, 1gotham, citybat, noocher, zaxme.
We wanted something shorter and ending in it." This is how the formula appeared (consonant)(vowel)(consonant)it.com
“We ended up with 2,205 domain options. 400 was more or less acceptable. But even among them there was mostly garbage. In this haystack we found yipit.com.”
So, hopelessness, the desire to show off, to come up with something memorable and/or as simple as possible - that’s what motivated most of the creators of witty names.
We also have a cool name,
Gennady Zavolokin,
The Twi Times
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