99% Of You Dont Know This ~ How Famous Companies Got Their Names?

Nike: Named for the greek goddess of victory. The swoosh symbolises her flight.
Skype: The original concept was ‘Sky-Peer-to-Peerâ€, which morphed into Skyper, then Skype.
Mercedes: This was actually financier's daughter's name.
Adidas: The company name was taken from its founder Adolf (ADI) Dassler whose first name was shortened to the nickname Adi. T
ogether with first three letters of his surname it formed ADIDAS.
Adobe: This came from the name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John Warnock.
Apple Computers: It was the favourite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was three months late for 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's 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'. So, instead of returning the cheque for correction, they decided to change the name 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.
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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.
Sony: It originated from the Latin word 'sonus' meaning sound and 'sonny' as lang 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.
Apache: It got its name because its founders got started by applying patches to code written for NCSA's httpd daemon. The result was 'A PAtCHy' server - thus, the name Apache Jakarta (project from Apache): A project constituted by SUN and Apache to create a web server handling servlets and JSPs. Jakarta was name of the conference room at SUN where most of the meetings between SUN and Apache took place.
Tomcat: The servlet part of the Jakarta project. Tomcat was the code name for the JSDK 2.1 project inside SUN.
C: Dennis Ritchie improved on the B programming language and called it 'New B'. He later called it C. Earlier B was created by Ken Thompson as a revision of the Bon programming language (named after his wife Bonnie).
C++: Bjarne Strous