Thursday, August 27, 2009

Secret Of Sucess

We use lots of electronic gadgets in our day to day life and few of them are electronic geeks. Before purchasing any product we will be very particular about the brand so let’s know about the history of a few behind their brand names.

1. Kodak: Founder George Eastman named the camera and film corporation in 1888. Eastman wanted a short name that was easy to pronounce and could only refer to his products. He later said that he favored the letter “k” because it “seems a strong, incisive sort of letter”. Once Eastman decided he wanted the name to start and end with “k”, he played around with combinations of letters until he found one that he liked in “Kodak.”

2. Sony: When Sony got its start in 1946, it had a decidedly less catchy name – Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo. Within a few years, the company’s founders wanted a new name, so they combined sonus, Latin for “sound” with “Sonny” the term of endearment for a young boy. The newly coined word captured both the superior sound quality and small size the company was shooting for with its products.

3. Nokia: The modern telecom giant hasn’t always been involved in such tech-heavy fields. The company got its start in Tampere, Finland, in 1865 as a pulp mill and paper manufacturer. When owner Fredrik Idestam opened a second plant in Nokia, Finland, in 1868, he decided the town’s name would be better suits his company too. The town takes its name from the Nokianvirta River that flows through it, which in turn takes its name from an archaic Finnish word referring to the small furry animals, mostly sables which lived on the rivers

4. Cisco Systems: The recent addition to the Dow Jones Industrial Average takes its name from San Francisco, where it was founded in 1984.

5. Toshiba: Toshiba formed following the 1939 merger of consumer products company Tokyo Denki with machinery firm Shibaura Seisakusho. By taking the “To” from the former and the “Shiba” from the latter, a new company name was born.

6. Sanyo: Sanyo’s name means “three oceans” in Japanese; the company’s founder wanted to sell his wares across the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific oceans to reach the entire world.

7. Canon: When Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory started developing Japan’s first-ever 35mm camera equipped with a focal plane shutter, the engineers dubbed the creation “Kwanon” after the Buddhist goddess of mercy. At this point the company’s logo even included the thousand-armed goddess. When the camera was ready to roll out worldwide in 1935, the company decided to tweak the name to “Canon” so it would be easier for international markets to accept.

8. Sharp: The electronics manufacturer got it's start in 1912 as metalsmith Tokuji Hayakawa’s personal outlet for his inventions including a specialized snap buckle. In 1915 Hayakawa invented an improved mechanical pencil he dubbed Ever-Sharp and to honor the fine point of his creation, Hayakawa started calling his company “Sharp”.

9. Motorola: Founder Paul Galvin named his company in a twist on the old naming convention of putting “-ola” at the end of phonograph and radio names like the Victrola. Since Galvin and his company were making car radios, he merged “motor” with “-ola” to get the name.

10. Samsung: Samsung got its start in 1938 when Lee Byung-Chull started the “Samsung Store” in Korea. The store initially focused on exporting dried fish and fruit and then jumped into electronics in the 1960s. The name Samsung in Korean is “Three Stars,” a nod to the lucky properties of the number three.

4 comments:

  1. stories behind every brand is interesting..

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  2. hi! i added you in my blogroll :)

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  3. Nice collection of Stories. Good one.

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  4. Good one. I came to knw about few interesting things. keep up the good work

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