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.

Xerox
 The Greek root "xer" means dry. The inventor, Chestor Carlson, named his
 product Xerox as it was dry copying, markedly different from the then
 prevailing wet copying.

Sun Microsystems
 Founded by four Stanford University buddies, Sun is the acronym for
 Stanford University Network.

Sony
 From the Latin word 'sonus' meaning sound, and 'sonny' a slang used by
 Americans to refer to a bright youngster.

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

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!

Oracle
 Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the
 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). 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).

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.

Microsoft
 It was coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to
 MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the '-' was
 removed later on.

Lotus
 Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from the lotus position or
 'padmasana.' Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation of
 Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

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.

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.

Hotmail
 Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing email 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 upper casings.

Google
 The name started as a jockey boast 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

Cisco
 The name is not an acronym but an abbreviation of San Francisco. The
 company's logo reflects its San Francisco name heritage. It represents a
 stylized Golden Gate Bridge.

Apple Computers
 Favourite 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.

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.