How did these companies got their names....

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 ' Moore Noyce'but that was already trademarked
by a hotel chain so they had to settle for an acronym
of INTegrated ELectronics.

Lotus (Notes)
Mitch Kapoor got the name for his company from 'The
Lotus Position' or 'Padmasana'. Kapoor used to be a
teacher of Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi.

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. Yet the full form is Oak Ridge Arithmetic Computer Logical Engine .

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 Universitybuddies, SUN is the
acronym for Stanford University Network. Andreas
Bechtolsheim built a microcomputer; Vinod Khosla
recruited him and Scott 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. Yet the full form is Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle. \m/

Facebook: The Ultimate Dot-Com

Facebook: The Ultimate Dot-Com

Paternot and Krizelman, in 2001

History will record that Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t the first college student to have the idea of enabling people to set up Web pages and share stuff with their friends. Yesterday, my colleague Silvia Killingsworth wrote about the Winklevoss twins, two Harvard grads who famously accused Zuckerberg of stealing the idea for Facebook while working on their fledgling site Connect U. Before the Winklevii, there were the folks behind MySpace and Friendster. And before them, way back in 1995, there were Todd Krizelman and Stephen Paternot, who launched TheGlobe.com from their dorm rooms at Cornell.

TheGlobe.com allowed people to create their personal space online, upload pictures, and set up what came to be known as blogs. By 1998, it had more than two million members, which was then considered impressive. It also had a business plan: sell advertising. On November 13, 1998, Bear Stearns issued 3.1 million shares in the company at nine dollars each to some of its clients—the lucky ones. When Bear’s traders tried to open the stock for trading, they found it difficult to establish a floor price. As I recalled in my 2002 book, “Dot.Con: The Greatest Story Every Sold” :

Whatever price they indicated—$20, $30, $40, $50—was too low. CNBC reported that the first trade might be $70, but even this proved to be a conservative estimate. After a lengthy delay, the first trade crossed the ticker at $87—almost ten times the issue price. Even for an Internet stock, this was unheard of. Within an hour, the price had risen to $97.

TheGlobe.com’s I.P.O. marked the beginning of the dot-com bubble’s epic stage. By the time the bubble burst, in March and April, 2000, hundreds of online firms had issued stock, among them many clunkers like Pets.com, E-Stamp, and etoys.com (not to be confused with a later company that used the same name), but also many online companies that survived and eventually thrived, such as eBay, Amazon.com, and Priceline.com. The bursting of the bubble discredited the term “dot-com,” which was understandable but, in a way, unfortunate, because the term itself had come to be the expression of an attitude that saw in online communication and online commerce boundless possibilities. Facebook’s I.P.O. represents a return to that mindset. It’s the fulfillment of the dreams of the nineties—and a reminder of their potentially fatal attraction.
While the term “dot-com” disappeared, the idea survived. Before very long, it was rebranded as “Web 2.0”—a term popularized by Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle, who from 2004 onwards organized a series of conferences under this banner. Supposedly, what distinguished Web 2.0 from Web 1.0 was user control, and user collaboration, with the network serving as a “platform,” but that wasn’t really a new idea: Krizelman and Paternot had fastened upon it years earlier, as had the founders of GeoCities and other Web-hosting ventures.

What really got Web 2.0 going was the proliferation of broadband connections, the invention of top-notch search engines (Google), and the creation of idiot-proof tools for doing fun stuff online, such as sharing photos and videos, posting blogs, and creating mashups. By February, 2004, when Zuckerberg launched Facebook, the elements were in place for the Web to fulfill the hopes of the late nineties—or some of them, anyway. But if Zuckerberg was in the right place at the right time—nobody should underestimate the role that the “Harvard” brand played in Facebook’s initial growth—he seized the opportunity ruthless and brilliantly. Now, seven years later, he is about to become a billionaire many times over by selling (non-voting) shares in what is, in many ways, the ultimate dot-com.

Back in the late nineties, I used to read a lot of S-1s—official investment prospectuses produced by companies about to issue public shares for the first time. Delving into Facebook’s S-1, which it has amended repeatedly since February, when it put out an initial version, felt like old times. The numbers were different (by an order of magnitude) from those that the original dot-coms used to put out, but the basic story was the same one that had led to all those bad investments and broken dreams: a Web site expanding this fast, with this many eyeballs focussed upon it, has simply got to be worth a lot of money.

Certainly, Facebook’s growth has been astonishing. As of March 31st, some nine hundred million people—about one in eight of all the humans on the planet—used the site at least once a month. More than five hundred million people—about one in thirteen of the global population—used it daily. Every day, Facebook users upload about three hundred million photographs and generate about 3.2 billion “likes” and “comments.” People on Facebook have a hundred and twenty-five billion “friends.” For many of us, Facebook has become a part of daily life. Many use it to keep up with friends; some use it as a news service; I’m in the camp of those who utilize it mainly as a professional tool. (Once I put up this post, I will link to it on my page.)

Compared to the late nineties, there are some basic differences, of course. Unlike many of the original dot-coms, Facebook makes money—quite a lot, in fact. It sells advertising and also charges other firms that use the site to drum up business, such as the gaming company Zynga and the music service Spotify. In 2011, on revenues of $3.7 billion, Facebook generated a billion dollars in profit. In the three months to March 31st, it made another two hundred million dollars.

That’s reassuring, but does it justify a valuation of a hundred billion dollars? That’s what the company will be capitalized at if the underwriters, led by Morgan Stanley—another echo of the late nineties—price its stock at the upper end of the $34-$38 range they indicated on Tuesday. If the stock goes up when trading starts, and it almost certainly will, Facebook will be even more highly valued. While I don’t think Facebook’s stock will enjoy the sort of crazy leap that TheGlobe.com’s took, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it close over fifty dollars, which would value Facebook at more than a hundred and twenty-five billion dollars.

For such a figure to make sense, given the risks attached to the technology industry, you have to assume that, within a few years, Facebook will be making not a billion dollars a year in profit but five billion dollars, or ten billion dollars, or even more. Apple, the world’s most valuable company—its market cap passed six hundred billion dollars briefly last month, and is currently hovering at a little more than five hundred billion—generated more than twenty-five billion dollars in profits last year. Microsoft, which is valued at less than half of Apple, made more than twenty-three billion. Google, valued at about two hundred billion, made nearly ten billion.

If it is to compete with these giants, Facebook will need to find a much better way to monetize its vast user bases. At the moment, it generates barely four dollars a year in revenues per user, primarily in the form of charging fees to advertisers. Maybe it can gin up more of these revenues, but there are still questions about the effectiveness of ads on social-networking sites. General Motors’ decision to pull its advertising from Facebook, which was announced yesterday, is hardly encouraging. Neither is the fact that Facebook still hasn’t properly figured out how to deliver ads to mobile users.

Simply relying on attracting more and more people to the site won’t do the trick. As the site’s audience approaches the saturation point in many advanced countries—more than sixty per cent in the U.S. and the U.K.; more than eighty-five per cent in Chile, Turkey, and Venezuela—its rate of expansion is inevitably slowing down. Between March, 2009, and March, 2010, the number of monthly active users rose a hundred and fifty-four per cent. Between March, 2011, and March, 2012, the growth rate was forty-one per cent. Quarterly figures confirm the slowdown. In the first quarter of 2010, the growth rate was 26.5 per cent. In the first quarter of this year, it was 8.9 per cent.

Another disturbing sign—and one very familiar to students of the dot-com bubble—is that Facebook’s costs are rising considerably faster than its revenues. Between the first quarter of 2011 and the first quarter of 2012, as it hired more engineers and sales people, and continued to invest in the site, its costs shot up ninety-seven per cent. Revenues rose by forty-five per cent. Consequently, Facebook’s profits in the three months to March were actually lower than they were a year earlier: two hundred and five million dollars compared to two hundred and thirty-three million.

None of this necessarily means that Facebook will be a bubble stock, or that it will meet the same fate as TheGlobe.com, which saw its market capitalization shrink to virtually nothing in 2001 before it closed down for good in 2008. Despite the recent slowdown in its growth, Facebook is an innovative, profitable company, which has established a unique and ubiquitous online presence that it may be able to exploit in ways that nobody, not even Zuckerberg, has yet dreamed of. I’d be willing to bet that in ten years’ time Facebook will still be around, and it will be a big player on the Web.

But how big? In Silicon Valley, many people view Facebook’s Web site, and its trove of user data, as the next key technology platform, something akin to Microsoft Windows and Apple iOS, which the company will leverage to create its own economic ecosystem—one that generates huge monopoly rents. Perhaps this will happen. For now, though, Facebook is basically an online media company, and there are some legitimate questions about its prospects. In purchasing its stock, as with buying the original dot-com stocks, investors will be laying out their cash primarily on the basis of hope and optimism rather than a clearly defined and firmly established business plan.

To me, at least, that has echoes of the past.

src:~http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/05/facebook-the-ultimate-dotcom.html

 

 

Open Sourcers Drop Software Religion for Common Sense

Open Sourcers Drop Software Religion for Common Sense

Mike Olson, the CEO of Cloudera, part of the new open source breed

Mike Olson was an open source pioneer. But he’s not an open source zealot.

Olson helped build the open source Berkeley DB database in the early 90s — before the Linux boom — and as the CEO of Sleepycat Software, he turned the database into a successful business using something very similar to the GPL, the free software license that was so essential to the rise of Linux. The GPL — or GNU General Public license — said that if someone modified free software and distributed the code with a larger product, they would have to contribute their work back to the community.

But in 2009, Olson founded Cloudera — the first outfit to commercialize Hadoop, the open source data-crunching platform based on Google’s software infrastructure — and he dropped the GPL in favor of the Apache license, a license that doesn’t require contributions back to the community. You might think that such licenses would stunt the growth of the open source world. But Olson believes the opposite is true.

The open source zealots don’t agree. But Olson is by no means the only one backing the Apache license. According to some statistics, the world’s open source projects are gradually moving away from restrictive licenses such as the GPL and towards more permissive licenses such as the Apache, and many open source watchers — including longtime pundit Matt Asay and Steven O’Grady, an analyst with developer-minded research firm RedMonk — agree that this shift will ultimately bring open source to a much wider audience.

“The business-side of open source has moved towards the Apache license model…and Mike Olson was out in front of everyone on that,” says Asay, who for many years downplayed the importance of the Apache license. “He was the guy, behind the scenes, constantly calling B.S. on all of us who believed in the GPL.”

The main forces behind this movement are the giants of the web, including Facebook and Twitter, which have a very different attitude towards open source than traditional software companies. But as these big names release more and more projects under permissive licenses, they’ve spawned a new breed of open source vendor, such as Cloudera, that’s potentially much more attractive to the world’s businesses because it avoids the GPL and other restrictive licenses.

Rightly or wrongly, many businesses are afraid of the GPL, worried it will force them to give up their proprietary code. But with the Apache license, that fear goes away. For Olson and others, this not only encourages the adoption of open source tools, it’s a better way for companies like Cloudera to actually make money from free software.



Apache Rising

Restrictive licenses such as the GPL are still the most widely used — by far — according to Black Duck Software, a company that tracks the use of free software licenses. But now that the free software movement has matured — and the web has changed the economics of the movement — Black Duck’s stats indicate that the GPL’s influence is waning in a favor of more permissive licenses such as the Apache.

According to the company’s numbers, the percentage of projects using the GPL dropped from 70 percent in June 2008 to about 57 percent today, while the Apache and the MIT — another permissive license — have risen to 5 and 11 percent respectively.

Brett Smith — the license compliance engineer at the Free Software Foundation, the not-for-profit that spawned the GPL — argues that stats like Black Duck’s are misleading. “It’s been hard to really figure out what those numbers really mean because they come from data that’s not fully published,” he says. “It’s hard to tell what really going on.” But others — such a Redmonk’s Steven O’Grady and Paula Hunter, executive director of the OuterCurve Foundation, a Microsoft-backed open source advocate — say they’re seeing the same trend that Black Duck sees. (Black Duck declined to be interviewed for this story).

“[Web companies] have a very different attitude towards open source than we’ve seen in the past. They don’t value code in the same way.”

What’s clear is that over the last few years, many of the highest profile open source projects have chosen the Apache license, including “cloud computing” platforms such as Hadoop, OpenStack, Cassandra, and CloudFoundry. Node.js, another of-the-moment cloud platform, uses the MIT License. And even the big-name mobile platforms have joined the crowd. Google’s Android mobile OS used the Apache license, and just this week, HP announced its schedule for open sourcing Palm’s webOS platform under the Apache.

It’s no coincidence that many of these projects grew out of the big web companies. “They have a very different attitude towards open source than we’ve seen in the past,” says Steven O’Grady. “They don’t value code in the same way. These companies are taking code that would have been proprietary five or six years ago — that would have been seen as differentiating code — and just releasing it. They don’t necessarily want or need the protections of a restrictive license.”

Companies such as Facebook and Yahoo — the companies that bootstrapped Hadoop — aren’t in the business of selling software. But that’s only part of the explanation. They built their operations using open source software they pulled from the community, so they’re happy to give back to others without requiring something in return. But at the same time, they realize that others feel the same way. They know a return will come anyway.

O’Grady points to Twitter as another prime example, with projects such as the open source database FlockDB and the open source web developer toolkit Bootstrap. Then there’s Rackspace with OpenStack, a platform for serving up virtual computing resources a la Amazon Web Services.

But the trend doesn’t stop there. Myriad businesses have sprung up around these open source projects, hoping to help the rest of the world adopt the software — and make some money in the process. Facebook’s open source Cassandra database spawned the Texas-based DataStax. Hadoop gave rise to not only to Cloudera but a Yahoo spinoff dubbed Hortonworks. Rackspace formed its own services division around OpenStack. And Joyent, the steward of Node.js, is selling software and services to companies using the open source development platform. Mike Olson is by no means alone.


The Poison and the Antidote

When Olson was at Sleepycat, Berkeley DB carried a “strong copyleft” license based on the GPL. You could use Berkeley DB for free, but if you did, you might have to pay the cost with your own code. For many companies, it was an unsettling proposition. Though they wanted Berkeley DB, they didn’t want to let go of software they’d spent years developing. But Sleepycat offered a loophole. If you paid Olson and company some money, they would give you a separate license that let you keep your own code. It’s a technique known as dual-licensing.

“The GPL was kind of the poison, and we would sell you the antidote.”

“The GPL was kind of the poison, and we would sell you the antidote. If you preferred not to infect your source code with the GPL, you could buy a different license,” Olson says. “This was reasonably successful for us, but we were never going to be a $100 million-a-year company. Our commercial transaction with our customers was founded on a threat: ‘Either you give me some money or I’m going to infect your intellectual property.’ That’s not a real good place to start a business conversation.”

In using the Apache license, Cloudera completely changes the dynamic. In essence, you can use the free code however you like — without contributing any of your own code back to the community. Cloudera makes its money by selling support and additional proprietary software that works in tandem with Hadoop. It’s a
strategy bridges the gap between free software and un-free software.

“Open source is a really important part of what we do. About half of our engineering spend goes to the open source [Hadoop] project,” Olson says. “But it’s important to differentiate ourselves from the rest of the market, to have a reason for customers to come uniquely to us.”

Some people call Cloudera an “open core” company. The core of the project is open source, and the for-pay software that Cloudera offers around it is not. But the name doesn’t come up as often as it once did. “Open core” developed a negative connotation among the community because it implied a lack of openness.

Mike Olson doesn’t care what you call it. “Whatever you call it,” he says, “it works.”


Open Source Pragmatism

The still private Cloudera says very little about it finances, but its list of customers includes such as names as Groupon, Rackspace, and Samsung, and according to Olson, it has made inroads beyond the tech world, on Wall Street and with biomedical outfits. A big part of the company’s success, he says, is the Apache license. He understands why people like Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman back the GPL — and, yes, the GPL was very good to Olson for many years. But these are new times.

“I don’t believe that a political or religious conviction is the sound basis for a business,” he says. “If you talk to some of the early free software folks, it was all about rights and responsibilities — and I understand why Richard focused on that stuff — but if you want to build a business, you have to focus on customers and markets and commercial opportunity. The GPL gives you some ways to monetize what you do. But there are other collaborative licenses that give you more.”

“I don’t believe that a political or religious conviction is the sound basis for a business”

The advantage is that the Apache is less threatening to potential customers. “If you want software to be used, you want an Apache license,” says Mark Radcliffe, a partner with international law firm DLA Piper who specializes in open source software. “There’s very little legal complexity for people to deal with.” And once you have the users, Olson, there are more ways of making money.

That lack of complexity is another reason so many web companies choose the Apache license when open sourcing their code. “The trend is driven in large part by companies that want to integrate open source development into their fundamental open source project strategy, but don’t want that headaches that arise from the GPL,” Radcliffe says. In other words, they don’t have to worry about giving up the code they don’t
want to give up.

The overarching theme is that open source software is mixing freely with proprietary code. That’s what the Apache license allows. Olson sees it as the future, pointing to giants such as Oracle and IBM that have built successful businesses around open source software projects. “I think that successful open source businesses will look a lot more like IBM or Oracle than Red Hat or MySQL or Sleepycat,” he says.

And he believes that even without licenses such as the GPL in place, companies will continue to contribute to open source projects because they now understand how valuable this can be. “As the industry has matured, I think that people have internalized the value of collaboration,” he says. “You don’t need to browbeat them.”

Facebook and Yahoo and Twitter have taught the world. And so has Mike Olson.


(src:-http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/02/cloudera-and-apache/)