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 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 3 months
late in
filing a name for his business, and he threatened to call his
company Apple
Computer if the other colleagues did'nt 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 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
the foundered be called Hewlett-Packard or
Packard-Hewlett.
