Adidas from the name of the founder Adolf (Adi) Dassler.

Adobe from the name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the houses of founders John Warnock and Chuck Geschke.

Akai technically it means red in Japanese, but the Japanese also use it to refer to the color of the rising sun, as seen on the flag of Japan.

Alfa Romeo the company was originally known as ALFA, an acronym for Anonima Lombarda Fabbrica Automobili. When Nicola Romeo bought ALFA in 1915, his surname was appended.

AltaVista Spanish for high view.

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos renamed the company Amazon (from the earlier name of Cadabra.com) after the worlds most voluminous river, the Amazon. He saw the potential for a larger volume of sales in an online (as opposed to a bricks and mortar) bookstore.

Apple for the favourite fruit of co-founder Steve Jobs and/or for the time he worked at an apple orchard. Apple wanted to distance itself from the cold, unapproachable, complicated imagery created by other computer companies at the time which had names such as IBM, DEC, Cincom and Tesseract in order to get people to use them at home. They looked for a name that supported a brand positioning strategy that was to be perceived as simple, warm, human, approachable and different.
Note: Apple had to get approval from the Beatles Apple Corps to use the name Apple and paid a one-time royalty of $100,000 to McIntosh Laboratory, Inc., a maker of high-end audio equipment, to use the derivative name Macintosh (Mac).

Ask.com search engine formerly named after Jeeves, the gentlemans gentleman (valet, not butler) in P. G. Wodehouses series of books. Ask Jeeves was shortened to Ask in 2006.

Aston Martin from the Aston Hill races (near Aston Clinton) where the company was founded, and the surname of Lionel Martin, the companys founder.

Atari named from the board game Go. Atari is a Japanese word to describe a position where an opponents stones are in danger of being captured. It is similar, though not identical, to check in chess. The original games company was American but wanted a Japanese-sounding name.

more coming soon