names

*There are many companies / brands / products whose* *names were derived
from strange circumstances/things/happenings.*

*Mercedes*

*This was actually the financier's daughter's name.*

*Adobe*

*This came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of
founder John Warnock.*

*Apple Computers*

*It was the favorite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was three months late
in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company
Apple
Computers if the other colleagues didn't suggest a better name by 5 O'clock
that evening.*

*CISCO*

*It is not an acronym as popularly believed. It is short for San Francisco
.*

*Compaq*

*This name was formed by using COMp, for computer, and PAQ to denote a small
integral object.*

*Corel*

*The name was derived from the founder's name Dr. Michael Cowpland. It
stands for COwpland REsearchLaboratory.*

*Google*

*The name started as a joke boasting about the amount of information the
search-engine would be able to search. It was originally named 'Googol', a
word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. After founders-
Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their
project to an angel investor, they received a cheque made out to
'Google'* *...thus
the name.*

*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
programming language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to
as HoTMaiL with selective uppercasing.*

*Hewlett Packard*
*Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company
they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.*
*
**Intel*
*Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company '
Moore Noyce'but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain so they had to
settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.*

*Lotus (Notes)*

*Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from 'The Lotus Position' or
'Padmasana'. Kapoor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation of
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.*

*Microsoft*

*Coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICRO
computer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the '-' was removed
later on.*
*
**Motorola*
*Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company started
manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radio company at the time was
called Victrola.*
*
**ORACLE*

*Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the CIA
(Central Intelligence Agency). The code name for the project was called
Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to give answers to all questions or
something such). The project was designed to help use the newly written SQL
code by IBM. The project eventually was terminated but Larry and Bob decided
to finish what they started and bring it to the world. They kept the name
Oracle and created the RDBMS engine. Later they kept the same name for the
company.*

*Sony*
*It originated from the Latin word 'sonus' meaning sound, and 'sonny' a
slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.*

*SUN*

**
*Founded by 4 Stanford University buddies, SUN is the acronym for S
tanford University Network. Andreas Bechtolsheim built a microcomputer;
Vinod Khosla recruited him and Scott McNealy to manufacture computers based
on it, and Bill Joy to develop a UNIX-based OS for the computer.*
*
**Yahoo!*

*The word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book 'Gulliver's
Travels'. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and action
and is
barely human. Yahoo! Founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name
because they considered themselves yahoos.*

*