Trivia

The Tokyo-based automobile manufacturer has technically been known as Nissan since 1934. And yet, when the brand expanded to the United States in 1958, it did so under the name Datsun. However, the Nissan name eventually made its away across the ocean, and so the company phased out Datsun completely in 1984.The Tokyo-based automobile manufacturer has technically been known as Nissan since 1934. And yet, when the brand expanded to the United States in 1958, it did so under the name Datsun. However, the Nissan name eventually made its away across the ocean, and so the company phased out Datsun completely in 1984.

When Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, co-founders of music sharing site Kazaa, first released their video chatting software in 2003, it was under the name Sky Peer-to-Peer. Upon realizing they needed something catchier, though, they tried to shorten the moniker to Skyper—and when they discovered that domain name was already taken, they settled on Skype. Who needs the R anyway?

In 1994, Stanford University electrical engineering graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo created a website with the thoroughly wholesome name David's and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web. A year later, as the site became more popular, they changed its name to Yahoo, simply because they liked the way this word from the 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels sounded.

French-born Iranian-American computer programmer Pierre Omidyar started AuctionWeb on September 3, 1995, with the idea of "bringing together buyers and sellers in an honest and open marketplace." Two years later, once traffic had grown beyond Omidyar's expectations, he tried to change the name to echobay.com in honor of his consulting firm Echo Bay Technology Group. When he learned the domain was already taken by a gold-mining company called Echo Bay Mines, he shortened it to his second choice: eBay

Sony started out in 1946 as a Tokyo electronics shop called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K. (which translates to Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation).

When they decided to rename the company, they considered calling it TTK, but the railway company Tokyo Kyuko was already known by that acronym. They then considered just using the word Totsuko, but found that Americans had a hard time pronouncing it during a visit to the U.S. Finally, they landed on Sony, a mix of the Latin word "sonus" for sound and "sonny," AKA a young, hip man.

Then, in 1971, Jeff Johnson, the man who ran the company's East Coast factory, mentioned that all of the great brand names at the time consisted of a single word that was easy to remember. Similarly, they all included at least one "exotic" letter like Z, X or K. So, Johnson suggested Nike, the name of the winged goddess of victory, and Blue Ribbon Sports was no longer. "I've had one good idea in my life and this was it," he said, according to Runner's World.

In 1893, Caleb Bradham developed a carbonated soft drink in his drugstore in New Bern, North Carolina, one that he simply called Brad's Drink in honor of his surname. Five years later, Bradham rebranded to Pepsi-Cola, using the root of the word dyspepsia (meaning indigestion) because he believed his drink was a "healthy" soda that aided in digestion. Eventually, however, "cola" became the common noun for the carbonated soft drink—so these days, we're just left calling it "Pepsi."

Believe it or not, the photo-sharing app Instagram actually started out as Burbn. When creators Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger first created their app, they foresaw it as being a combination of elements of Foursquare and of Mafia Wars. They named it after Systrom's favorite drink: Kentucky whiskey.

On July 5, 1994, Bezos initially incorporated the company in Washington state with the name Cadabra, Inc. After a few months, he changed the name to Amazon.com, Inc, because a lawyer misheard its original name as "cadaver".

Back in 1996, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin were working on creating what we now know as Google, they initially called it Backrub—a nod to the way the search engine analyzed the web's "back links" to determine how important a site was. A year later, though, they decided they needed to upgrade to a name that indicated just how much data they were indexing—and eventually, they came up with Google, a take on the number "googolplex," which is the digit 1 followed by googol zeroes (or 10¹⁰⁰ zeroes).