Some famous company names and their reasons

We sometimes are surprised by how companies choose their names. Here is a list of few famous companies and how they chose their names.

1.  Mercedes
  This was actually the financier's daughter's name.

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

3.  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.

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

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

Another source: Compaq = COMPuter And Quality.

6. Corel
  The name was derived from the founder's name Dr. Michael
  Cowpland. It stands for COwpland REsearch Laboratory.

7. 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'.

8. 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 forthe 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. Microsoft
   Coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to
   MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the '-'
   was removed later on.

13. 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.

14. 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 some such thing). 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.

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

Another source: Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony, was looking
    for a word which was small enough to be displayed on every
    product he made and also easily pronouncible. After several words,
    he shortlisted "Sony". There is no meaning to the word.

16. 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.

17. 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.

Another Source: Yahoo is an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical
Officious Oracle. Yang and Filo insist they selected it because they
liked the definition for yahoo in "Gulliver's Travels"