Oliver Christian Google Kai is 13 years old. Photo courtesy of the Kai family

When a little baby boy came wailing into the world on Sept. 12, 2005, his birth made headlines far from his home in Sweden. Oliver Christian Google Kai's quirky techno name caught the attention of blogs across Europe and in the United States, and the search giant itself even published its own post, writing "we wish him long life and good health, and hope his schoolmates aren't too hard on him." The boy's father, Walid Elias Kai, worked in search engine marketing at the time and admired Google's services as well as the hugeness of the number "googol" (a misspelling gave the search engine its name). Young Google Kai isn't the only child whose parents chose technology-inspired names for their progeny. Here's his story and three others:

Oliver Kai, now 13 with floppy brown hair and braces, is sweet but totally uninterested in telling a journalist more than 7,000 miles away about what it's like to be named after one of the most powerful of companies in the world. "I am sometimes shy about it," he said simply. "People ask me why my name is like this, and I tell them." Because it's not his first name, it's not something that his peers needle him over very often, and when it does come up, the remarks aren't exactly scathing. "Sometimes people call me the smart guy," he said. "Like Google, like I know everything." "He is a smart guy!" his dad exclaimed proudly. "He has a special character." Kai will occasionally tease his son — calling him Google, or Oliver Google — but overall he seems to be more bashful about the name than his son is. "He knows that I use Google a lot in my work, and I still do — he goes from accepting it to not accepting it," the father said. "I don't want him to feel like it was something for a PR purpose. It really was something else." While the name was certainly inspired by the search engine, Kai and his wife had also read an old English children's book about an imaginary creature called Google, and felt that naming their son after a big number — a googol — would represent how many friends he would make in his life. "It was something special and unique," he said. "It also made a buzz." For several years, he kept a blog about his son, which is still viewable via the Internet Archive.

The Kai family (Oliver on left) Photo courtesy of the Kai family

Karen Wickre, the former Google employee who wrote the company's blog post, still remembers the surprise and says she called up Kai before publishing. "It felt like an indicator of how well known and familiar Google was getting at the time," she said. "But I don't think we viewed it as a point of pride as much as, 'People are funny.'" Kai says he still loves and trusts Google's services, despite some of the company's recent privacy failures. "I applied for a lot of jobs at Google actually," he said. "I was doing some organic search engine optimization, some growth hacking. … I don't think I made it through their filtering system."

Like, Vista and Iuma

The Ardit family; Like likes her name Photo courtesy of Vardit Adler

In 2011, another Silicon Valley giant got a shout-out when an Israeli couple named their daughter Like. Vardit Adler says the inspiration came from Facebook, but that she and her husband also loved the meaning of the word — "to give good feelings to others" — and thought that it sounded nice in both Hebrew and English. "People at first are surprised but after knowing Like and our family, will accept the name," said Adler, who works as an algorithm engineer. Unlike the Kais, the Adlers never heard directly from Facebook, even after their story was written up by the likes of tech news sites Mashable and Gizmodo. Vardit Adler herself didn't even have her own Facebook account until six months after her daughter's birth but does still check it today. She enjoys the app but believes that company needs to be clearer with its privacy and data policies. "Our older daughters have Facebook accounts, too, but both of them are more active on Instagram," Adler said. "Like has a Facebook account that my husband maintains."

Baby Vista Simser Bil Simser | Flickr Creative Commons