The most of us have laready heard the story of  how Google got its name. But Google isn’t the only company out there with an odd name. Here’s the list of stories behind the naming of popular tech brands.

• HP: Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard flipped a coin to decide whether their company would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.
• SUN Microsystems: It’s actually an acronym for Stanford University Network, the school where the founders met.
  Cisco: Actually not an acronym, as often assumed. It’s just San Francisco without the San Fran, which is why the “c” was not capitalized originally.
• Apple: The company was late in filing for a name and trademark, and Steve Jobs issued an ultimatum: Come up with something better than Apple. No dice.
• Microsoft: Microsoft made MICROcomputer SOFTware. Get it? Yeah, that’s all there is to it. (During their early history, Microsoft wrote their name “Micro-Soft.”) Sometimes the best answer is the most obvious.
• Oracle: The company grew out of a CIA project codenamed “Oracle” that was ditched. The founders took the name and ran.
• Sony: Japanese companies are often named after their founders (Toyota), but Akio Morita wanted a name that wouldn’t sound foreign to the American consumers he was targeting. It was derived from sonus, the Latin word for sound, and a weird Engrish slang expression, “sonny boy”, which in 1950s Japan connoted “smart, presentable young men,” which is what Morita considered himself. So no, Sony doesn’t mean anything in Japanese, and there is no Mr Sony.
• Google: The founders had settled on “googol,” a one with 100 zeroes after it, to signify their ambitions. But an early investor (one of those SUN guys, again) wrote “Google” on a check. So they changed the name so they could cash it.
  For more improbably stories, and some probable ones (HP), click here.
• Cisco: The name Cisco Systems is often thought to be an acronym, but it actually derives from San Francisco — another Silicon Valley-inflected name. This is the reason why, during the company’s early days, they insisted on the lowercase cisco.
• Intel: Intel cofounders Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore originally wanted to call the company “Moore Noyce”, but found out it was already trademarked by a hotel chain. So they came up with Intel, which stands for “INTegrated ELectronics.” Still a pretty good description, actually.
• Adobe: According to Wikipedia, adobe is “a natural building material made from sand, clay, horse manure and water” but that’s not what the company was named after. It was named after Adobe Creek, a river in Los Altos, California, that ran behind the house of one of the founders, John Warnock.
• Yahoo: Much was made of the name Yahoo!, both by the media, for whom it symbolized the insouciance of dot com companies back in Bubble 1.0, and by the company itself, which calls its employees “yahoos” and its founders “chief yahoos.” There are several conflicting stories about how the name came about. 1. One is that cofounders Jerry Yang and David Filo were browsing through a dictionary (remember those?) to look for name ideas and that they happened upon the definition of a yahoo as “rude, unsophisticated, uncouth” and they liked that. 2. Another is that they drew from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, where he coined the word to refer to a race of brutish humanoid creatures. 3. The last (and once official) story, almost certainly retroactive, is that the name is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.” Maybe an “Officious Oracle” that was part of the CIA?

The European Commission has granted its unconditional approval to Microsoft and Yahoo's search partnership, meaning the long-term deal has cleared its last major regulatory hurdle.

Sometimes mega-deals in the technology industry take a long time to sort out…and such has been the case with the long-term search partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo that will see Microsoft’s Bing handling the back end of searches performed via Yahoo properties, with Yahoo continuing to develop its own search features and front end on top of Bing. The companies first announced the 10-year partnership in July 2009, and have been working out details ever since. Now, the European Commission has granted its unconditional approval to the partnership: coupled with previous approval from the U.S. Justice Department, the deal has cleared its last major regulatory hurdle and the companies will finally get down to work. The deal had previously been approved by regulators in Brazil, Canada, and Australia.
“This breakthrough search alliance means Yahoo can focus even more on our own innovative search experience,” said Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, in a statement. “Yahoo gets to do what we do best: combine our science and technology with compelling content to build personally relevant online experiences for our users and customers.”
Yahoo and Microsoft say they will worth with developers, publishers, and advertisers to make the transition as painless as possible. Under the deal, Microsoft will provide Yahoo with search results from Bing, but Yahoo will build its own services around those listing by integrating Yahoo content and services. In addition, Yahoo’s sales and support deal will exclusively handle high-volume advertising customers, while Microsoft will handle “self-service” advertisers. The companies hope to have the first results of their efforts up and running at least in the United States by the end of 2010, with most advertisiers transitioned to the new services before the start of the 2010 end-of-year holiday buying season. The companies hope to have all customers and global markets transitioned to the new platform by early 2012.
The search partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo is slated to last at least ten years.

LAHORE: A strategic partnership agreement was signed between the Punjab government and a computer software company, Microsoft, at the Chief Minister’s Secretariat here on Friday.
Under the agreement signed by additional chief secretary Javed Aslam and Microsoft head in Pakistan Kamal Ahmad, the company will extend all-out cooperation for training and development of the local IT industry in Punjab. It will also set up an innovation centre at the Software Technology Park.

Speaking on the occasion, Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif said the three-year agreement would prove to be a milestone in the promotion of information technology in the province.

He said the Punjab government had adopted a comprehensive strategy for promoting IT and foundation of a revolution in the education sector had been laid by setting up of IT labs in schools.

He said information technology would also be used for evolving a system of accountability for eradication of corruption which was the most serious problem being faced by the country. In addition to uplift of the education sector, Microsoft would also extend cooperation in improving the efficiency of Technical Education and Vocational Training Authority (Tevta) besides providing free software to 454 IT academies running under its control, he said.

Mr Sharif said under the agreement, IT training centres would also be set up in Punjab which would be managed by Microsoft for one year. Master trainers would be trained in these institutions and sent to far-flung areas. It would help produce a large number of IT experts. An IT Park would also be set up in consultation with Microsoft to promote IT activities, he said.

The chief minister said under the agreement, the Punjab government would invest Rs3 billion in three years and Microsoft Rs1.5 billion, and resultantly the government would earn a profit of Rs500 million.

Microsoft Company for Middle East and Africa President Ali Faramawy said the agreement would help improve the efficiency of education and other sectors in Punjab, and this partnership would leave a far-reaching impact.

Microsoft Outlook, the most popular email client around worldwide, includes tons of features that make email easier to use and help us be more productive in our communications. The other great thing about Outlook is that you easily add new features to the software through plug-ins, many of which are available for free on the web.
The Outlook Guide has four parts:
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2. Social Networking Add-ins for Outlook – Check out some smart add-ins that bring social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter right into your Outlook client.
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