Thursday 30 September 2010

How did they name it?


*Mercedes:*
This was actually 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 Jobbs. 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 that day

*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 Pagepresented 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. WhenSabeer 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 Kapoor got the name for his company from 'The Lotus Position'
or'Padmasana' . Kapoor 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' 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.

*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.

*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 Stroustrup called his new language 'C with Classes' and then 'new C'.
Because of which the original C began to be called 'old C' which was
considered insulting to the C community. At this time Rick Mascitti
suggested the name C++ as a successor to C.

*Java: *
Originally called Oak by creator James Gosling, from the tree that stood
outside his window, the programming team had to look for a substitute as
there was no other language with the same name. Java was selected from a
list of suggestions. It came from the name of the coffee that the
programmers drank.

*LG: *
Combination of two popular Korean brands Lucky and Gold star.

*Linux:*
Linus Torvalds originally used the Minix OS on his system which here placed
by his OS. Hence the working name was Linux (Linus' Minix). He thought the
name to be too egotistical and planned to name it Freax(free+ freak + x).His
friend Ari Lemmke encouraged Linus to upload it to a network so it could be
easily downloaded. Ari gave Linus a directory called linux on his FTP
server, as he did not like the name Freax.(Linus' parents named him after
two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling) .

*Mozilla: *
When Marc Andreesen, founder of Netscape, created a browser to replace
Mosaic (also developed by him), it was named Mozilla (Mosaic-Killer,
Godzilla) .The marketing guys didn't like the name however and it was
re-christened Netscape Navigator.

*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!

*SAP:*
"Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing", formed by 4 ex-IBM
employees who used to work in the 'Systems/Applicatio ns/Projects' group of
IBM.

*SCO (UNIX):*
From Santa Cruz Operation. The company's office was in Santa Cruz .

*UNIX: *
When Bell Labs pulled out of MULTICS (MULTiplexed Information and Computing
System), which was originally a joint Bell/GE/MIT project, Ken Thompson and
Dennis Ritchie of Bell Labs wrote a simpler version of the OS.They needed
the OS to run the game Space War which was compiled under MULTICS. It was
called UNICS - UNIplexed operating and Computing System by Brian Kernighan.
It was later shortened to UNIX.

*Xerox: *
The inventor, Chestor Carlson, named his product trying to say `dry' (as it
was dry copying, markedly different from the then prevailing wet copying).
The Greek root `xer' means dry.

*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.

*3M:*
Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company started off by mining the
material corundum used to make sandpaper.

Monday 13 September 2010

From studying under the streetlights to CEO of a US firm


Here is the rags-to-riches story of an extremely talented boy from a small village in Tamil Nadu who has risen to be the chief executive officer of a company in Seattle, USA.

It is also the story of how Kalyana Raman Srinivasan, who was so indigent that he had to study under a streetlight, but then managed to score excellent marks, rose in life and became today's Kal Raman.