COMPANY BRAND/PRODUCTS DERIVED FROM...

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.

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 REsearch Laboratory.

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'

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'. Kapor 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 MICROcomputer 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 Stanford 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
Gullivers 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