How Tech Companies Got Their Name

Adobe: Adobe was named after the Adobe Creek in Los Altos, California, which ran behind the home of co-founder 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.









Microsoft: The word Microsoft is derived from the words Microcomputer and Software and it has an interesting history. Bill Gates used the word Micro-Soft in a letter he wrote to Paul Allen, the other co-founder of this company on November 29, 1975 and they later registered this company in this name on November 26, 1976. The hyphen was eventually removed and it came to be known from then on as Microsoft.






Motorola: This company started as Galvin Manufacturing Corporation in 1928 in Chicago, Illinois, manufacturing battery eliminators. Founder Paul Galvin came up with the name Motorola when this company started manufacturing radios for cars in 1930. The name is a combination of the word "motor" and "Victrola", which was a popular radio company at the time.

Oracle: Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) while at Ampex Corporation. The code name for the project was called Oracle, because the CIA saw this as something like a system to give answers to all questions much like the mythical Oracles of the ancient world.






Red Hat: This Linux distro that released in 1994 has an interesting history. Marc Ewing, who created this distro had been given the Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes) while at college by his grandfather. However, he lost it and despite looking for it did not find it. The information is revealed in the manual of the beta version of Red Hat Linux, which had an appeal to readers to return his Red Hat if found by anyone. Interesting, isn't it?






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

Sony: Formerly known as Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K., the co-founder of this company, Akio Morita realized that Americans had difficulty pronouncing this name while on a business trip to the US. He therefore tried to find a Romanized name for this company, which would be appealing to Americans and would also embody the spirit of the company. After trying out different names, they arrived at a decision to use "Sony" as the name. This word has been derived from the Latin word Sonus meaning sound, and Sonny a slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster. They chose this word as this did not exist in any other language. Another theory suggests that the name was derived from the word Sun, because Japan is known as the Land of the Rising Sun and also the place of origin of this company.






Sun Microsystems: Stanford University graduate Andy Bechtolsheim designed what would become the first Unix workstation by Sun Microsystems, known as Sun 1 workstation for a project as a personal CAD workstation. The name SUN is an acronym of Stanford University Network that got stuck to the company from then on and Andy Bechtolsheim was one of the four founders.





Xerox: This company started as The Haloid Company in Rochester in 1906 when it manufactured photographic paper and equipment. It later changed its name to Haloid Xerox in 1958 and then dropped Haloid to become simply known as Xerox in 1961. The word Xerox has its roots in the Greek language, where "xer" means dry. Chestor Carlson, the inventor of dry copying named it thus to emphasize the fact that this process was dry and different from the prevailing wet copying method.






Yahoo!Originally named "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web", this company was renamed to Yahoo! in April 1994. Yahoo is the official backronym of "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" and it is also a word invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book Gulliver's Travels. It represents a person who is rude, uncouth and unsophisticated, something which Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo considered they were.

Thanks : http://www.techtree.com

Holiday and Events – Google style!

Improvements to Realtime Search

The blogosphere is a dynamic environment that changes almost as quickly as the world that we live in. And as access to information becomes more widespread and more immediate, the blogosphere is steadily closing that gap. That’s why the Blogger Team is excited to spread the word about Google’s new improvements to Realtime Search, which provide richer and fresher results than ever before.

From the new Realtime Search homepage, you can search live updates, recently-published blog posts, and news from around the web in brand new ways. Now you can restrict your search to include just updates from a specific geographic region or just nearby you. You can also check out complete conversations from Twitter. You can also now set up custom alerts for Realtime updates to be sent directly to your inbox once a day or week, or as soon as the happen for instant blog post fodder.

For more information about Realtime’s new features, please visit

www.google.com/landing/realtime.

Super Simple: Your Creative Canvas

When it comes to design, sometimes less can be more. This is the mantra behind our newest variant Super Simple, freshly-released to the Template Designer this week. We’ve taken the original Simple variant and stripped it down to the bare essentials, putting your actual blog content front and center on the page.

As with all of our variants, you are free to tweak all of the individual elements and styles to your liking. And if you are looking to design a fancy blog template from scratch, the Super Simple variant is also a great frame to build upon.

You can check out the new variant right now in the Template Designer, under the Simplecategory. As always, our ears are open to your feedback, so please feel free to let us know what you think.

Get Related Content for Your Blog with the Zemanta Gadget

Guest post by Boštjan 'Bos' Špetič, Zemanta CEO

About a year ago this blog featured Zemanta, a tool that helps you get more out of blogging. Previously, Blogger users could install a Zemanta browser plugin to recommend content while you blog, enabling you to:

• Read news to learn more about the topic
• Link articles to improve the value of your post
• Use pictures to make your post richer

Today we are pleased to announce that we've teamed up with Blogger to make it easier to use Zemanta on Blogger. To use Zemanta, just follow these three easy steps:

1. Click this link: Add Zemanta gadget. It will take you to a page to add the Zemanta gadget to your blog:

2. Select one of your blogs in the drop-down box, and click Add Zemanta. This will add the gadget to the post editor for your selected blog, and take you to a new post page.

3. You will see Zemanta is already turned on, waiting for you to start using it.

That's it! You are now all set up to boost your blogging. Simply write a couple of sentences and the recommendations will show up automatically. You can preview them and then simply click on an item to add it to the post.

To learn more about how best to use Zemanta, check out this video, browse through our tutorials, read about our selection as one of ReadWriteWeb's "Top 10 Semantic Web products" last year, or just get started and play around with it. We would love to hear your feedback or suggestions.

Happy blogging!

* Notes: Adding Zemanta gadget will automatically update your blog's post editor to the New Editor; Also, this feature is currently available only for English-locale users.

How Blogger Inspired The Creation Of BlogWorld & New Media Expo

Guest post by Rick Calvert, CEO of BlogWorld & New Media Expo 

When the Google Blogger team asked me to write a guest post for the Blogger Blog, I really didn’t know where to start. Today it occurred to me that the story of how I found Blogger might be a good place.

I have been reading and commenting on blogs since the year 2000. I am a news and political junkie so most of the blogs I read were political. Tons of them were hosted right here on Blogger. I was amazed at the original news being reported; the insightful commentary and opinion; the incredibly moving personal stories from Milbloggers and their families and yes the crazy conspiracy theories. This Blogging thing was really incredible. Who were all these smart people?

So many times I wished I could be a blogger, but I wasn’t a techie or a geek and it just seemed like it would be too difficult. Fast forward to 2005; I was in the middle of my two-hour daily commute home on the 91 freeway out of Los Angeles and listening to center right talk radio guy Hugh Hewitt. He said something that got me worked up so I called in. I don’t remember what we talked about but at the end of the conversation he said “you should start a blog.” So that night I went home and Googled “how to start a blog.” Blogger was the first result. So I clicked through and found the message you have all seen and the message that changed my life forever “Create Your Blog Now.” I had no idea how easy it was to start a blog! It only took me five minutes to do something I had been longing to do for nearly five years!

Things started moving very quickly from there—someone actually read my blog. How the heck did they find me? I wondered. Top political bloggers from both sides of the aisle were linking to me. TO ME! Every political pundit I asked to interview said yes! Other bloggers were selling books on their site through Amazon. I thought to myself, I read a lot of books; I should sell the books I like on my blog. A friend helped me sign up as an Amazon Associate and I was off to the races. Then one day an Ad Network contacted me and wanted to sell ads on my blog.

I had so many questions. How much money could I make blogging? How do I add things like widgets and blog rolls to my blog? Can I do audio and video posts? So I started looking for the “Blogging Tradeshow.” Being a tradeshow and conference organizer for the last 15 years I knew there was a tradeshow for every industry. I was stunned when I realized no such conference existed. I asked my blogger friends if they would ever attend the “Blogging Tradeshow.” They all said yes. I asked my tradeshow friends if they thought it was a good idea. They all said yes.

And so BlogWorld & New Media Expo was born in November of 2006. We held our first event in November of 2007 with 1,600 attendees! This October 14-16 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas we will host the fourth annual BlogWorld & New Media Expo. Over 4,000 bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers, internet radio, and TV broadcasters will be attending and things have come full circle.

We are thrilled that for the first time the blog platform that changed my life, Blogger, will be exhibiting at BlogWorld. We have had folks from Blogger speak at the conference every year, and this year Product Manager Chang Kim will be speaking on “The Future of Blogging Platforms.” And now for the first time all of you can visit the Blogger booth (# 308) and ask your own questions. Or just stop by to say hi and meet the Blogger team, or like me stop by and give them a huge THANK YOU for changing your life.

By the way if you still need to register for the show, as a member of the Blogger community you can use this special code for 20% off of any registration package at BlogWorld 2010:BLOGGER20

Viglink: Easier Way to Monetize Links On Your Blog

Guest post by Oliver Roup, VigLink CEO

If you spend as much time working on your blog as we do, you wonder if there's a way to get paid. Many bloggers monetize by selling ads on their site but now there is a way to get paid for your actual content rather than just the ads that go around it.

Any time you write about a product or service, you're connecting your audience to that product. If someone makes a purchase, the seller benefits from your written word—you influenced a purchase. There are thousands of websites that will pay you a fee for any business you bring them through a form of online advertising called affiliate marketing. With affiliate ads, web publishers are compensated for driving online actions.

VigLink is a content monetization company that makes affiliate marketing very easy for bloggers. We offer a simple snippet of code you can install in your blog that automatically and transparently does all the work for you. We've catalogued and signed up for more than 12,500 affiliate programs and we collect all the performance information and deliver you a single integrated payment. In return, VigLink takes 25% of the incremental revenue you earn.

There are no other costs or fees and nothing changes about how your site looks or behaves.Join VigLink and enroll your blog in less than a minute or learn more by watching this two minute video.

Oliver Roup is the CEO and co-founder of VigLink, a content monetization company backed by Google Ventures. 

Great wall of customers greets iPhone 4 in China

On a faster boat to China.

(Credit: Apple)

Despite a somewhat tepid reception last year for an earlier version of the iPhone, customers in China turned out in force Saturday to try to get their hands on the latest incarnation, the iPhone 4, as it made its debut in the country.

According to various reports, more than 1,000 people mobbed the new Apple Store in Beijing's Joy City shopping mall Saturday, and carrier China Unicom said it had taken almost 50,000 preorders for the device in one day. That compares with a mere 5,000 iPhones sold last year during the first weekend that the earlier version of the gadget was available in China.

That version was 3G only, with Wi-Fi disabled because of Chinese regulations prohibiting gadgets that don't use the country's WAPI (Wired Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure) wireless standard. The iPhone 4, however, has been made Wi-Fi-ready for the Chinese market--Apple having acquired a network access license in the country in July.

The price, too, has come down. A 16GB iPhone 4 is selling for about $743 and the 32GB version for about $892 without a contract at Apple Stores in China, the company said on Monday. (The phone will also be available through China Unicom with a two-year contract at prices Apple did not detail.) Last year's iPhone 3--Wi-Fi-less in China--went on sale in the country at about $732 for an 8GB model and about $1,025 for a 32GB version.

Apple is no doubt pleased by the seeming uptick in iPhone love among the Chinese--the country is the world's largest mobile market. The company opened two new Apple Stores there Saturday, according to an item in The Wall Street Journal: the Joy City location, and another across town at a mall called The Village. That doubles the number of Apple's Chinese retail outlets. The company plans to open 25 Apple Stores in China by the end of next year, the Journal said. Apple also began selling its iPad in the country on September 17.

Still, there's a ways to go. When the iPhone 4 debuted in the United States earlier this year, it sold, according to Apple, 1.7 million units in three days, the company's most successful product launch ever. And Apple was only the fifth-largest smartphone seller in China as of the second quarter of this year, according to figures quoted by the Journal. Nokia held the top spot.

On a side note, Apple may be able to duck iPhone 4 "Antennagate" issues in China--China Unicom said last month that the device would be sold with a free case there.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20017642-37.html#ixzz10cS3bCWy

Thanks :- http://news.cnet.com/

Studio executives discuss potential of 3D

James Cameron's "Avatar" did boffo box office and sparked the current 3D craze.

(Credit: 20th Century Fox)

NEW YORK--That famously off-the-mark wisecrack, made when the Warner Bros. co-founder was confronted by the advent of talking pictures, was given an airing Friday at the 3D Experience Executive Forum here. Likened to current naysaying about 3D movies and TV, the quote was referenced by David Naranjo, director of product development for Mitsubishi Digital Electronics, along with several other ill-fated predictions in entertainment--as if to say: They'll eat those words!

Resisting 3D may be futile, but we still don't know to what extent 3D will invade our lives. That was what executives gathered to discuss. Will 3D be a part of every screen, from TVs to ATMs, as predicted by Jim Chabin, CEO of the International 3D Society? Will it be a staple of learning tools in the classroom, as predicted by Michael P. Guillory of Texas Instruments? Or will it simply be the thing kids get excited about at the movies because it makes dinosaur tails come flying toward their noses?

Chabin said 3D will be omnipresent on all displays because "the cost of making a screen 3D is the same as making it color. It's nothing. It's just another chip and a little more gas." What holds up adoption is consumer confusion. The lack of a standard for 3D glasses is confusing enough, but couple that with the fact that most consumers don't understand that a 3D TV is also a 2D TV and what is left is an adoption cul-de-sac. Studios and hardware manufacturers love the potential. Consumers don't know what to think.

Much like high-definition TV, consumers may not initially understand the need to pay more for 3D content through their cable boxes. Delivering 3D content will heavily tax the Internet service provider, even if the format is properly compressed, meaning that already-pricey cable TV will be even pricier with 3D channels.

Of course, content is king, but the format is too nascent and, at times, too kitschy.

"You can't take a bad movie, turn it into 3D, and make it a good movie," said Richard Gelfond, CEO of IMAX Corporation.

What you can do is convert 2D content into 3D content, but not everyone thinks that approach produces the best results. 3D purists think movies should be conceptualized and shot in 3D from the get-go. Others think conversion is an essential way to jump-start the 3D brand.

"There is generally about 15 to 30 percent savings when you shoot in 2D and convert to 3D," said Dr. Barry Sandrew, president of Legend 3D.

Though 2D conversion is expensive and time consuming, the fact that consumers pay more for tickets to 3D movies provides some incentive. But in the theater, 3D is a novel outing. At home, 3D can be a distraction. You can't multitask while watching a 3D film, and you can't wear any glasses besides those intended for the specific television set you purchased.

"Will consumers wear glasses in the home?" asked Robert Mayson, president of RealD. "Speaking as someone who has worn glasses in the home since 11 years of age, the answer is yes. But the content has to be good enough."

Just because Mayson is willing to wear another set of glasses doesn't mean everyone will be. And don't hold your breath for a glasses-free 3D TV anytime soon.

"Autostereo, or glasses-free, is of course the holy grail, but you have to get there at the right quality," said Mayson. "Nobody really knows when that will come. My personal opinion is that it has to do with quality of image--and when that happens at a price us mere mortals can afford."

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20017640-93.html#ixzz10cT9Ivr8

Thanks :- http://news.cnet.com/

Zuckerberg on Oprah: More than crisis PR

Zuckerberg and Oprah. They go together like steak and custard. At least in the eyes of many, perhaps slightly jaundiced, observers.

The story goes that the Facebook CEO's appearance Friday on Oprah Winfrey's show was a vast, cynical attempt to blunt any ill effects from the launch of a movie that portrays him as a sleazy little nerd with slightly less than one scruple.

That story, of course, may be true. The grand gesture of a $100 million donation to schools in New Jersey certainly offers a counterweight to a movie in which only billions seem to matter.

But perhaps this appearance had far more value than mere temporary crisis management.

This was Zuckerberg's first real appearance before real people. This was the first time that those whose children spend far more time on his site than they do, say, talking to their moms, got to see who was behind this weirdly addictive phenomenon.

And what the Facebook CEO did so well was to appear awkward, uncomfortable and almost painfully human.

Mark Zuckerberg on Oprah from Cindy W on Vimeo.

He is not a natural Oprah-embracer.

His attempt at a hug was beautifully clumsy. The look in his eyes that said: "How many more minutes of this must I endure?" was quite precious. His answer to the question of why he chose to donate vast sums of money to New Jersey lacked a little conviction (answer should have been: "Oh, come on, New Jersey always needs help. Even Carmelo Anthony doesn't really want to go there").

But he presented his face to those who really matter.

Those who really matter are not people in the tech world who rightly criticize him for his obvious, cynical obfuscations on the subject of privacy.

The people whom Zuckerberg must now present himself to are the real people out there who use his site, not understanding all the implications of their participation.

Recently, tech CEOs are coming to realize that their real constituency is not those with whom they feel strangely comfortable--their own kind--but those real humans who rely on their products every day. It is not coincidence that Google CEO Eric Schmidt is now trying to tell jokes.

And while Zuckerberg may have gone kicking and screaming onto Oprah, no doubt wriggling and screeching as that jacket was forced around his shoulders by several large bouncers, he may have to do more of that endearing deer-in-headlights public presentation.

Facebook is the most human site of all. Unlike Google, it is not about cold, hard information. It is about the warm, cuddly aspects of humanity. You know, friendship, kinship, and telling your ex that your ship has sailed.

Zuckerberg's human, awkward, steady-relationship, girlfriend-kissing, house-renting, Chinese-learning self is surely fundamental to making real people feel a little more comfortable about his brand and its motivations.

Not merely at a time when he might perceive a PR crisis, but for a much longer term, and purpose.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20017638-71.html#ixzz10cTx6lwg

Thanks :- http://news.cnet.com