How did these ten famous Internet companies get their names. When it comes to Internet companies, we have to mention the three Internet giants BAT (Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent), because they are involved in too many fields. In addition to their own industries, they have also acquired and invested in many Internet companies. We use their products almost every day, such as WeChat, Taobao, Baidu Search, etc. We can often see them when we watch the news. It's hard to know them.
Although we are in contact with them every day and are familiar with their company names, there may not be many people who really know the origin of their company names. Today, we will talk about these world-class Internet companies and their names together with the master of Netforest.
How did these ten famous Internet companies get their names?
Alibaba
I believe everyone has heard the story of Alibaba and the Forty Thieves. Yes, the inspiration for Alibaba Group's naming comes from this. The reason why it is called "Alibaba" is, on the one hand, because the name is easy to remember and popular, which can leave a deep impression on customers and users, and is conducive to communication and business development. On the other hand, when Jack Ma founded Alibaba, its position was that it was an international enterprise, with customers all over the world, and "Alibaba" is known by almost people all over the world, which just fits this position.
There is also an interesting story about the name "Alibaba". One time when Ma Yun was having a meal in a restaurant in San Francisco, he suddenly got inspiration. He asked the waiter if he knew the name of Alibaba. The waiter replied: sure, Alibaba, Open Sesame! (Of course, Ali Baba, open sesame). After Ma Yun came back, he asked his family and friends again. He found that everyone was familiar with Alibaba's story, so he came up with the name "Alibaba".
Ma Yun also said at the alumni meeting that Alibaba is the sesame that opens the door. We said on the first day that we should open Sesame for all small businesses in the world, so that there is no business difficult to do. In fact, this sentence is subtly related to the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. In the story, the password to open the cave is "open sesame".
Ma Yun means that Alibaba is a cave full of wealth. Cooperating with them is equivalent to opening the door to wealth, and getting rich is just around the corner.
How did these ten famous Internet companies get their names?
tencent
The name of Tencent is different from that of Alibaba. It has the element of inspiration. Ma Huateng spent a lot of time on the name of Tencent, and finally decided to use "Tencent" as the company name after layers of screening.
In October 1998, Ma Huateng prepared to establish Tencent and invited Zhang Zhidong (Tencent CTO, one of the five founders) to discuss the name of the company. Since it is a computer service, it must be able to connect with technology and the Internet (there was no concept of the Internet in the 1990s, and Google, Microsoft and other companies all call themselves technology companies).
Lucent in the United States was a famous technology tycoon at that time, and his former employer, Runxun, had a great influence on Ma Huateng (Ma Huateng worked for Runxun for 5 years). So he decided to name the company with the word "Xun" as the core. The two people came up with: Netnews, Jiexun, Feixun And so on.
After some discussion, Ma Huateng finally chose "Tencent", which means "Tengda" and "Tengfei". In addition, the word "Teng" appears in his name, perfect!
In addition to the above, there is another important reason. When registering trademarks, many names were registered, and only Tencent could register them. As for Tencent's English name, Tencent, also comes from Lucent: lucent. The combination of Tencent's pinyin and the English word cent means "Tencent", which means ten points in Chinese.
How did these ten famous Internet companies get their names?
Baidu
Baidu's name is full of poetry, with a sense of literature and art. The word "Baidu" is taken from Xin Qiji's "Blue Jade Case · New Year's Eve": people look for him thousands of times, and when they look back, the man is in the dim light, which is a very artistic sentence.
Don't think that Li Yanhong only knows these common poems. He is a talented student of Peking University. He has loved Tang poetry and Song poetry since childhood and has studied Chinese traditional culture. The name of the conference room of Baidu headquarters "Qingyu case" is derived from Xin Qiji's ci brand name "Qingyu case · Yuanxi".
As for the origin of Baidu's name, Robin Li once explained that his idea was to use a word that Chinese people all know and has the meaning of search, but the word "search" should not appear. It should have cultural heritage. I also thought about it for a long time, and then I came up with Xin Qiji's words. At that time, I settled down. The word "Baidu" completely met his idea.
Baidu's moral can be understood as follows: beautiful things are within reach, symbolizing that Baidu Search can find the beautiful information you want and present it to your eyes.
Byte skipping (today's headlines)
How did these ten famous Internet companies get their names?
Byte bounce
Today's Toutiao app and Tiao Yin, which we use now, belong to the byte beating company, but many people are accustomed to calling it Toutiao today. In 2018, Zhang Yiming officially announced that the company was called "Byte Beat". In fact, as early as March 2012, he had established "Beijing Byte Beat Technology Co., Ltd.", which had never changed its name during this period.
How did the name "byte skipping" come from? Similar to Tencent's way of naming, it is also the result of the founder's brainstorming. Zhang Yiming strongly agreed with Jobs' statement of "standing at the crossroads of science and technology and art". After a lot of voting, he chose the English name "ByteDance", where byte (computer storage unit) represents science and technology, and dance (dance) represents art, which is very consistent with Jobs' view of integrating science, technology and art.
Why is it an English name? The reason is very simple. Zhang Yiming also hopes to be a global company like Ma Yun, so he gives priority to English names. Because domestic registered companies must have Chinese characters, Zhang Yiming translated them into some names such as "byte dance", "byte jump", and finally chose "byte jump" as the company name.
How did these ten famous Internet companies get their names?
millet
With its high cost performance ratio, Xiaomi fought for a way for domestic mobile phones in the heavy encirclement of Samsung, Nokia, Apple and other giants. There are many rumors about the name of millet. Some people said that they had a bowl of millet porridge and tears filled their eyes. Others said that it was to pay tribute to Steve Jobs' Apple.
The truth is that Xiaomi was called "Red Star" at the beginning, which is the red star of Red Star Erguotou. In 2010, eight founders of Xiaomi gathered at a hotel named "Zhulu Teahouse" in Wudaokou, Beijing, to discuss the establishment of the company.
When naming the company, everyone had a heated discussion and felt that their name was good. It happened that there was a hall in the hotel called Xuande Hall, so everyone suggested that since no one was convinced, it should be called "Xuande". Xuande Technology and Xuande Mobile Phone.
After everyone calmed down, they found that the name was not quite like the company name, it was too traditional, and they planned to change it. Dali (now Xiaomi's director of ecological chain) suggested that we should call it "Red Star". The red star shines on China. It has a Chinese flavor, easy to understand and remember. Everyone thought the name was good, so they planned to register a trademark. As Tencent did, Red Star had already been registered by Red Star Erguotou, so they had to give up.
Although the Red Star was abandoned, the naming did not end. One morning, an old man brought a pot of millet porridge to the founder for breakfast. Everyone ate happily and warmly. This is the inspiration. Millet is the staple food of the Chinese people, which is very friendly. In addition, the English name of the mobile Internet is Mobile Internet (transliteration: Mobo Intel Knight). Its abbreviation is "MI", which is exactly the pinyin of the meter character.
So we checked the domain name and trademark registration information of rice, red rice and black rice, and finally agreed to "millet". It is said that the pot of millet porridge was cooked by the father of Li Wanqiang, the founder, at 5 o'clock in the morning. The pot is still on display in the Rolling Stone World Building.
How did these ten famous Internet companies get their names?
Huawei
Huawei, the first of China's top 500 private enterprises and the world's top 500 enterprises, is a top national brand in terms of popularity, appeal and Internet influence in China.
In 1987, Ren Zhengfei borrowed money everywhere and planned to use the 20000 yuan he had collected to launch a final fight. One year later, Huawei was born in an old house in Shenzhen. In an interview with a French reporter, Ren Zhengfei laughed about Huawei's name, saying, "It's casual.
When registering the company at that time, Ren Zhengfei saw the loud slogan "China is promising" on the wall and used it directly, not as deeply as Baidu, Byte Beat and other companies thought. Later, Ren Zhengfei thought about changing his name, because "Huawei" issued a closed accent, which was not loud enough, and he always wanted to change a word with an open accent. However, as time goes by, I don't plan to change it later.
At a time when Huawei is limited everywhere, this name is more powerful and full of hope - China has a future!
How did these ten famous Internet companies get their names?
Meizu
Meizu, the pioneer of Chinese smart phones, launched the first Chinese smart phone in 2009, Meizu M8. M8 is praised by netizens as the "Homemade Machine King", and there is no one! Huang Zhang, the founder of Meizu, was also given the good name of "China Jobs".
There is no official explanation for the origin of the name Meizu. According to the anecdote, there are mainly two explanations.
The first is from the hometown of the founder. The name of the company is usually decided by the founder, who usually has some personal color when naming, such as Lao Ganma, Wang Shouyi, Zhang Xiaoquan, etc.
Huang Zhang's hometown is Meizhou, Guangdong. "Meizu" is homonymous to his hometown "Meizhou", so some people think that Meizu's sister comes from the homonym of Huang Zhang's hometown Meizhou. Huang Zhang was expelled in his freshman year of high school and never went to college, so it is very possible to say this.
The second is from the game StarCraft. Huang Zhang is an old player of StarCraft. StarCraft will be very popular there. There are Zerg, Terran and Protoss in the game. Then he created his own family and called the good-looking and attractive young players the Charming Family, or Meizu for short.
In my opinion, this kind of talk is totally untrue, but it is exactly the most popular one.
There is also a third argument that Huang Zhang mistyped meizi into meizu when registering a trademark, so he mistook meizu for the brand name.
How did these ten famous Internet companies get their names?
google
Google is a variation of the English word "googol". "Googol" is a word created by Milton Sirotta, nephew of Edward Kasner, an American mathematician, which means a number with 100 zeros after 1. Google uses this word to represent the company's ambition to conquer the endless information on the Internet. But it was Sean Anderson, a Stanford University student, who came up with the name. When searching the Internet domain name registration data, he typed the word "google. com". It just happened that the domain name could be registered, so the name google came into being.
How did these ten famous Internet companies get their names?
Yahoo!
The word Yahoo comes from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. In the novel, it is a guy whose appearance and behavior are disgusting, not even people. Yahoo! Founders Yang Zhiyuan and David Filo chose this name for a strange reason. They think they are Yahoo. Another saying is that Yahoo is the acronym of "YetAnother Hierarchical Official Oracle". However, Yang Zhiyuan and David Filo don't think so. The reason why they like the name is that the dictionary defines yahoo as "rude, unsophisticated and vulgar", which hides a hint of arrogance, like Ma Yunduo's "Flat Head Brother". This prototype is a honeypot, which is called "the most fearless animal".
How did these ten famous Internet companies get their names?
Apple
Officially, Jobs was determined to build the company into a world-class giant, so he thought of Newton. The first logo was Newton holding an apple, because many people knew the story of Newton's gravitation, and reached the condition of becoming a household name. I felt that the logo was not simple enough, so I removed Newton and left only one apple.
Others said that it was because Jobs liked Apple at ordinary times that he designed the logo in the shape of an apple. At the beginning, the apple was in the shape of a whole apple. It looked like a butt. This logo was afraid of being laughed at, so I took a bite on the apple in the back, so that people would not think of the butt.