Its owner Jeff Bezos initially registered the company in Washington state with the name Cadabra in July 1994. However, after a few months, the name was changed to Amazon. As per Bezos, Amazon represented something exotic and different.
Can you believe that the search engine giant was originally known as BackRub? By 1997, its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin realised the name was not good enough. They later changed the name to "Google," a play on the word "googol," representing the vast amount of information they aimed to organise.
Confinity, a software company, developed a way to transfer money between handheld devices. After a merger with X.com, an online banking company founded by Elon Musk, the company was renamed PayPal.
The video streaming platform was known as Kibble before its launch. Its co-founder Marc Randolph realised that the name of the beta version was in fact bad. He eventually considered names such as ‘Webflix’, ‘TakeOne’, ‘NetPix’ before settling on Netflix.
Even the wildly popular social media platform Instagram didn't start out as Instagram. It was initially known as Burbn. It was more of a complicated version of modern-day Instagram, which had a check-in feature. The app was overhauled later to make it more user-friendly, which also led to a change in its name.
Blue Ribbon Sports was the original name of the company co-founded by Phil Knight. In 1971, they rebranded as Nike, Inc., inspired by the Greek goddess of victory, to reflect their focus on athletic footwear and apparel.
After Verizon acquired Yahoo's core internet business in 2017, the remaining assets, including Yahoo's stake in Alibaba Group and Yahoo Japan, were rebranded as Altaba Inc.
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