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June 20, 2010

Origins of Famous company names (Part 2)

12. Lotus: 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.

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

14. 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.

15. Nike: named after the Greek goddess of victory.

16. Nokia: started as a wood pulp mill the company expanded into producing rubber products in the Finnish city of Nokia. The company later adopted the city’s name.

17. Oracle: Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). 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).

18. Pepsi: named from the digestive enzyme pepsin

19. Red Hat: Company founder Marc Ewing was given the Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes) while at college by his grandfather. He lost it and had to search for it desperately. The manual of the beta version of Red Hat Linux had an appeal to readers to return his Red Hat if found by anyone!

20. Reebok: alternate spelling of rhebok an African antelope.

21. SAP: "Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing", formed by four ex-IBM employees who used to work in the 'Systems/Applications/Projects' group of IBM.

22. Samsung: means three stars in Korean language.

23. Sanyo: means three oceans in Japanese language.

24. Sony: From the Latin word 'sonus' meaning sound, and 'sonny' a slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.

25. Sun Microsystems: Founded by four Stanford University buddies, Sun is the acronym for Stanford University Network.

26. Xerox: The Greek root "xer" means dry. The inventor, Chestor Carlson, named his product Xerox as it was dry copying, markedly different from the then prevailing wet copying.

27. 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 popular belief is that Yahoo stands for Yet another hierarchical officious Oracle.

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