Sellsius real estate marketing blog

Saw a comment in dustbury (via Samantha Burns) which linked to Wikipedia’s List of Company Name Etymologies. For those of you who find the origin of company names interesting, this Wiki is a must read.

Though some accounts may be disputed, there’s no disputing that people spend a lot of time trying to pick a good one. Here’s a sampler:

Akamai: Hawaiian for clever, intelligent, cool
Epson: Son of Electronic Printer
Adobe: named after the Adobe creek running behind the founders’ homes
Lexus: Luxury Export ot the US
37 Signals: after a NOVA show watched by the founders. It represents the number of unknown signals picked up by SETI which may be from intelligent life in the universe (I wonder if that includes on Earth)
Haagen-Daz: two made up words meant to look/sound European so Americans would think it cooler than home grown Ben & Jerry’s. Known as “foreign branding” or how to snooker American consumers. (for a laugh see how some foreign products would have a tough sell in the US).
Coca-Cola: cocoa leaves and kola nuts
BIC: after founder Marcel Bich (good thing he didn’t go with “Bich”)
CVS: Consumer Value Stores
Google: the name from which Google is derived was the million pound answer on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire in England in 2001. (Unfortunately the contestant who answered correctly, Charles Ingram, was accused of cheating by using a confederate’s cough).

And for the historical record, Sellsius: from Anders Celsius, the Swedish astronomer who proposed the temperature scale later bearing his name, almost universally accepted as the standard of measurement (except for the US - ohoh). (He was also a realtor in Uppsala Sweden, but this is highly disputed.) The variant spelling is the active verb in transactional real estate. We dispute the myth that the name derives from an expression used by the founders “If you want to sell, see us.”

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