Nokia - started as a wood-pulp mill, the company expanded into producing rubber products in the Finnish city of Nokia. The company later adopted the city's name.

Apple Computers - favorite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was three months late in filing a name for the business, and threatened to call his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn't suggest a better name by 5 o'clock.

Huawei - HUA in Chinese means China. WEI means doing. HUAWEI means "China doing something".

CISCO - short for San Francisco. It has also been suggested that it was "CIS-co" - Computer Information Services was the department at Stanford University that the founders worked in.

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

Compaq - using COMp, for computer, and PAQ to denote a small integral object.

Corel - from the founder's name Dr. Michael Cowpland. It stands for COwpland Research Laboratory.

Google - the name is a misspelling of the word googol, reflecting the company's mission to organize the immense amount of information available online. It was originally named 'Googol', a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. After founders - Stanford grad 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 markup language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing. (If you click on Hotmail's 'mail' tab, you will still find "HoTMaiL" in the URL.) HP - 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 trade marked by a hotel chain, so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.

AMD - stands for Advanced Micro Devices.

LG - combination of two popular Korean brands i.e. Lucky and Goldstar.

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.

Sony - 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