There are many companies / brands / products whose
names were derived from strange circumstances.
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'. 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 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 '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.