How some Tech Companies Got Their Names

Adobe

Adobe was named after the Adobe Creek in Los Altos, California, which ran behind the home of cofounder John Warnock.







Apple Computers

The first slogan of this company was "Bite into an Apple", while its more famous slogan is "Think Different". Probably thinking differently, the founder, Steve Jobs, named this company "Apple Computers" while he was driving along with Steve Wozniak between Palo Alto and Los Altos. Jobs and his friends used to work on a community farm cultivating apples while he was working in the Bay Area of San Francisco. Jobs was three months late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if his colleagues didn't suggest a better name. As you can guess, they didn't come up with anything better and the rest is history. Other theories are that Jobs wanted his company to feature before Atari in the phone book, while yet another suggestion is that it was a tribute to Apple Records, which was the music label of the Beatles.

Cisco

Even though its current headquarters is in San Jose, California, this company was founded in San Francisco, California in 1984 and took the last five letters of the name of this city for the company name. This is the reason why the company's engineers insisted on using the name in lower case as "cisco" previously rather than "Cisco" as it is now known. The company logo also has the stylized Golden Gate Bridge of San Francisco.

Google

The name of this company started as a jockey boast about the amount of information the search-engine would be able to search. The word "Google" is a misspelling of the word "Googol", which means a 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 and received a cheque made out to "Google". The search engine of this company was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site and rank it in the search.

Hewlett-Packard

HP or Hewlett-Packard got its name from the founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, but the story of its name is nonetheless interesting. Hewlett and Packard could not agree as to whether the company should be named Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett, so they decided to resolve the matter by tossing a coin. Packard won the toss and decided to name it Hewlett-Packard Company in 1939.

Hotmail

The founder of this company, Jack Smith, came up with the idea of accessing email via the web from a computer anywhere in the world without having the prevailing restrictive system of having to use the email server provided by the ISP. When the other founder, Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending with 'mail', and finally settled for Hotmail, as it included the letters "HTML", which is Hyper Text Markup Language - the programming language used to write web pages. Launched on July 4, 1996, it was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing.

Intel

At its inception, founders Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company "Moore Noyce" but discovered that this name was already trademarked by a hotel chain. Also, they felt that it didn't sound nice as the pronunciation was eerily similar to 'more noise', which is not suitable for a semiconductor company. They used the name NM Electronics for the first year before arriving at Intel, which is the acronym of INTegrated Electronics and that is how the company has been known since.

Lotus

Founder, Mitch Kapor, christened this company as Lotus, inspired by the "padmasana" or the yoga asana with a lotus position. The roots to this choice of name could be the fact that Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Actor Ajith and his passion for Photography

It’s not something you’d associate with an action hero. But to Ajith Kumar, photography helps beat the stress of rigorous shooting schedules.

It was in the year 2000 during the shooting of his film “Dheena” that Ajith Kumar got hooked on to photography. The cinematographer, Arvind, was an enthusiast and his infectious interest rubbed off on Ajith. Ever since Ajith has been dabbling in photography, shooting anything and everything that came his way.

“In fact, after I gave up active motor racing, I took my camera to Sepang, Malaysia last year to the Formula One races and shot a whole lot of action pictures,” says Ajith.

But, it was only recently that Ajith decided to get trained by a professional photographer to really understand the technical aspects of photography. “I attended a crash course in photography organised by Raja Ponsingh at his Ambitions unit,” informs Ajith. The actor, meanwhile, had equipped himself with Nikon D2X and D700 SLRs with a complete range of lenses, including a tripod and a monopod.

Camera, a must-have

Earlier it was more of amateur shooting. “Camera became my constant companion, especially while on long outdoor shoots. I’m able to relate better to the filming camera after my interactions with my Nikons,” feels Ajith. While there are no special subjects he would like to shoot, he loves the unusual, candid pictures he has been able to take, like the ones reproduced here.

“It is really true how a picture speaks a thousand words. I am able to communicate better with my friends and associates and, hopefully, my fans will be able to identify better with me and my views and feelings which I convey through my photography,” says Ajith.

Explaining the photographs, he says, “The one of the fish in an auto was spotted by me when I was on the way to a location shoot in Visakhapatnam in 2008.

And, the other one of the man carrying the goats on his bike was taken last year while I was on my way to a friend’s farm near Tambaram. These are fleeting moments and, if not captured on the spur of the moment, are lost forever.”

In the midst of tiring days of continuous shooting and tension-filled hours, the camera comes as a relief to Ajith, the actor. “As an actor, it does help your creativity, apart from helping me unwind on the sets. I am even able to relate better to the cinematographer on technical aspects and interest in photography, as I found recently with Nirav. I am even able to find myself when I’m lost in the midst of shooting scene after scene,” says Ajith.

And, ever since the birth of his daughter Anoushka, Ajith has been recording every moment of her growth. He says, “I’ll probably have more than a thousand pictures of her and it will be a veritable treasure for her when she grows up.”

Google Wave can be `dangerous'

Websense Security Labs has detected that Google searches on terms related to Google Wave return results that lead to a rogue antivirus.


Google Wave is the much talked-about, latest API whuch has just hit the collaboration scene. There's a lot of hype about the launch of Google Wave, not only because of the 'new' things it offers but also because Google invited only 100,000 lucky users to test the service. With that said, it's no surprise that users are enticed to this new application.

According to InformationWeek, cyber criminals have rolled out a blackhat SEO poisoning campaign to turn interest in Wave into a computer infection. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) aims to optimize Web sites to appear prominently in search results when relevant keywords are searched.

Writes Thomas Claburn, "Blackhat SEO tries to do the same thing while flouting search engine guidelines about acceptable practices, such as prohibitions on the deceptive use of text or page elements. Blackhat SEO may also try a parasitic approach, by embedding malicious code in someone else's well-ranked Web page and redirecting the visitor without notice or permission."

According to him, search terms such as "google wave demo video" and "google wave invitation" have recently produced lists of search results which include malicious Web sites that have gamed Google's PageRank system to appear prominently.