Origins of Famous company names (Part 1)

1. Adobe: The name came from the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John Warnock.

2. 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.

3. Apple Computers: 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.

4. Cisco: The name is not an acronym but an abbreviation of San Francisco. The company's logo reflects its San Francisco name heritage. It represents a stylized Golden Gate Bridge.

5. Coco-cola: derived from coca leaves and kola nuts used in flavoring. Coca-cola creator John S. Pemberton changed the ‘K’ of kola to ‘C’ to make the name look better.

6. Google: The name started as a jockey boast 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’.

7. Hotmail: Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing email 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 upper casings.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. KFC: short for Kentucky Fried Chicken. It is popularly believed that the company adopted the abbreviated name in 1991 to avoid the unhealthy connotation of the word “fried”.

11. Kodak: the word has no meaning. It is one of the twists in the corporate world. Eastman Company the makers of Kodak researched and found out that KODAK does not mean anything in any language. As it means nothing there is no chance of the name being misunderstood in any language of the world.