Origin of Company Names
Some highlights from the full Wikipedia article.
7-Eleven – Convenience stores; renamed from “U-Tote’m” in 1946 to reflect their newly extended hours, 7:00 a.m. until 11:00 p.m.
eBay – Pierre Omidyar, who had created the Auction Web trading website, had formed a web consulting concern called Echo Bay Technology Group. “Echo Bay” didn’t refer to the town in Nevada, “It just sounded cool”, Omidyar reportedly said. Echo Bay Mines Limited, a gold mining company, had already taken EchoBay.com, so Omidyar registered what (at the time) he thought was the second best name: eBay.com.
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.)
Nike – named for the Greek goddess of victory.