Where did that company name come from?

Apple Computers

It was the favourite 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 '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

Interesting and some weird Language Facts

* The first word spoken on the moon was "okay."

* Seoul, the South Korean capital, just means "the capital" in the Korean language

* The name of all the continents end with the same letter that they start with

* The "you are here" arrow on maps is called an ideo locator

* The word "lethologica" describes the state of not being able to remember the word you want

* In English, "four" is the only digit that has the same number of letters as its value

* Q is the only letter in the alphabet that does not appear in the name of any of the United States

* The word "trivia" comes from the Latin "trivium" which is the place where three roads meet, a public square. People would gather and talk about all sorts of matters, most of which were trivial

* TYPEWRITER, is the longest word that can be made using the letters only one row of the keyboard

* "Speak of the Devil" is short for "Speak of the Devil and he shall come". It was believed that if you spoke about the Devil it would attract his attention. That's why when you're talking about someone and they show up people say "Speak of the Devil"

* The word "Checkmate" in chess comes from the Persian phrase "Shah Mat," which means, "the King is dead"

* The sentence "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every letter in the English language

* The only 15-letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.

* Canada is an Indian word meaning "Big Village"

* Stewardesses is the longest word typed with only the left hand

* The most common name in the world is Mohammed

* The longest non-medical word in the English language is FLOCCINAUCINIHILIPILIFICATION, which means "the act of estimating as worthless".

* Mafia in Old Arabic means 'sanctuary.'

* The longest word in the Old Testament is "Malhershalahashbaz."

* Karoke means 'empty orchestra' in Japanese.

* The first message tapped by Samuel Morse over his invention the telegraph was: "What hath God wrought?"

* The first words spoken by over Alexander Bell over the telephone were: "Watson, please come here. I want you."

* Papaphobia is the fear of Popes

* The Academy Award statue is named after a librarian's uncle. One day Margaret Herrick, librarian for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, made a remark that the statue looked like her Uncle Oscar, and the name stuck.

* The first words spoken by Thomas Edison over the phonograph were: "Mary had a little lamb."

* The three words in the English language with the letters "uu" are: vacuum, residuum and continuum.

* A baby in Florida was named: Truewilllaughinglifebuckyboomermanifestdestiny. His middle name is George James

* 'Dreamt' is the only English word that ends in the letters 'mt'

* There are only four words in the English language which end in '-dous': tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous

* The word 'Bye' is used in both English and Spanish meaning the same thing

* Pogonophobia: The fear of beards

* In Chinese, the words crisis and opportunity are the same

* The infinity character on the keyboard is called a "lemniscate"

* Good bye came from God bye which came from God be with you. So-long came from the Arabic salaam an the Hebrew shalom

* The word 'nerd' was first coined by Dr. Seuss in 'If I ran the Zoo'

* before Jets, Jet lag was called Boat lag

* The word "monosyllable" actually has five syllables in it

* There are no words in the English language that rhyme with silver and orange

* The letter "n" ends all Japanese words not ending in a vowel.

* It is believed that Shakespeare was 46 around the time that the King James Version of the Bible was written. In Psalms 46, the 46th word from the first word is shake and the 46th word from the last word is spear.

* 'Zorro' means 'fox' in Spanish

* You won’t find a "6" in Cameroon phone numbers--the native language has no sound for "x."

* The only 15-letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is "uncopyrightable."

* Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them would burn their houses down--hence the expression "to get fired."

Check out these Interesting Facts about the Human body.

You can all try the first one right now!!!!

While sitting at your desk make clockwise circles with your right foot. (go ahead no one will see you) While doing this, draw the number "6" in the air with your right hand. Your foot will change direction.


* Grapefruit scent will make middle aged women appear six years younger to men. The perception is not reciprocal and the grapefruit scent on men has no effect on women's perception.
* Women blink twice as many times as men do.
* Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair.
* We are about 1 cm taller in the morning than in the evening. Layers of cartilage in the joints gets compressed during the day.
* There are approx. 550 hairs in the eyebrow.
* The strongest muscle in the human body is the tongue.
* The life span of a taste bud is 10 days.
* The world's youngest parents were 8 and 9 and lived in China in 1910.
* The largest known kidney stone weighed 1.36 kilograms.
* Most dust particles in your house are made from dead skin.
* Kidney stones come in any color--from yellow to brown.
* Babies are born without kneecaps. They appear when the child is 2-6 years of age.
* The average human produces 10,000 gallons of saliva in a lifetime.
* If you ate too many carrots you would turn orange.
* The force of 1 billion people jumping at the same time is equal to 500 tons of TNT.
* A baby is born every seven seconds.
* You can tell if a skunk is about if you smell only .000000000000071 ounce of its spray.
* You breathe about 10 million times a year.
* The colder the room you sleep in, the better the chances are that you'll have a bad dream.
* The foot is the most common body part bitten by insects.
* The most common time for a wake up call is 7 a.m.
* The typical person goes to the bathroom 6 times a day.
* The fastest growing nail is on the middle finger.
* The most sensitive finger on the human hand is the index finger.
* The human body weighs 40 times more than the brain.
* After eating too much, your hearing is less sharp.
* A person swallows approx. 295 times while eating dinner.
* Your urine will turn bright yellow if you eat too much asparagus.
* There are more people alive today than have ever died.
* The human body is better suited to two four-hour sleep cycles than one eight-hour one.
* A man's beard contains between 7000 and 15,000 hairs.
* A beard grows an average of 140mm a year
* A hair is 70 per cent easier to cut when soaked in warm water for two minutes
* Women's hair is about half the diameter of men's hair
* During an average lifetime, a man will spend 3,350 hours removing 8.4 meters of stubble
* 4.5 million people have their health 'adversely affected' by air pollutants each year.
* 4 million children die each year from inhaling smoke from indoor cooking fires that burn wood and Dung
* 4 million people die annually from diarrhea infections, caused by poor sanitary conditions
* The hardest bone in the human body is the jawbone.
* Chewing on gum while cutting onions can help a person from stop producing tears. Try it next time you chop onions!
* Until babies are six months old, they can breathe and swallow at the same time. Indeed convenient!
* Offered a new pen to write with, 97% of all people will write their own name.
* Male mosquitoes are vegetarians. Only females bite.
* The average person's field of vision encompasses a 200-degree wide angle.
* To find out if a watermelon is ripe, knock it, and if it sounds hollow then it is ripe.
* Canadians can send letters with personalized postage stamps showing their own photos on each stamp.
* Babies' eyes do not produce tears until the baby is approximately six to eight weeks old.
* It snowed in the Sahara Desert in February of 1979.
* Plants watered with warm water grow larger and more quickly than plants watered with cold water.
* Wearing headphones for just an hour will increase the bacteria in your ear by 700 times.
* Grapes explode when you put them in the microwave.
* Those stars and colors you see when you rub your eyes are called phosphenes.
* Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.
* Everyone's tongue print is different, like fingerprints.
* Contrary to popular belief, a swallowed chewing gum doesn't stay in the gut. It will pass through the system and be excreted.
* At 40 Centigrade a person loses about 14.4 calories per hour by breathing.
* There is a hotel in Sweden built entirely out of ice; it is rebuilt every year.
* Cats, camels and giraffes are the only animals in the world that walk right foot, right foot, left foot, left foot, rather than right foot, left foot.
* Onions help reduce cholesterol if eaten after a fatty meal.

And here is a kicker!!
* The sound you hear when you crack your knuckles is actually the sound of nitrogen gas bubbles bursting.