One of the interesting forward that I received today is about various names and thier stories. Worth sharing.

Mercedes -> This was actually the financier’s daughter’s name.

Adobe -> This came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind
the house of founder John Warnock.

Apple Computers > It was the 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.

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
‘MooreNoyce’ but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain so they
had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.

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 Scot t 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

Disclaimer: I am not responsible for the authenticity of the information provided in the above article.