What's a name worth? I guess a lot. not just for individuals, but also for companies and brands. Perhaps for this reason, Mark Zuckerberg renamed the parent company of scandal-plagued Facebook as "Meta." As expected, the rebranding initiative has drawn a lot of attention on social media and in the media.
Although Zuckerberg is not the only business owner to rebrand or rename his company, we have compiled a list of amusing previous names for the brands that we all know and love today.
BackRub (Google)
When Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin started developing Revolutionary Product, what is now known as Google in 1996, they originally dubbed it Backrub, a reference to how the search engine evaluated a site's "back links" to gauge its importance. They eventually came up with the moniker Google, which is a play on the number "googolplex", which is the digit 1 followed by a googol zeroes. A year later, though, they realised they wanted to upgrade to a name that represented just how much data they were indexing (or 10100 zeroes).
Burbn (Instagram)
Unbelievably, Burbn was the original name of the photo-sharing software Instagram. The app's original designers, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, anticipated that it would combine features from Mafia Wars and Foursquare. They gave it the name Kentucky whiskey, Systrom's preferred libation.
However, they went back to the drawing board after finding the app was too busy and clutteredwhich made them to simply preserve the photo-sharing feature. Due of these modifications, they changed its name to Instagram, which Systrom thought "sounded camera-y", according to Inc. It is a mix of the words "Instant" and "Telegram.".
Cadabra (Amazon)
Amazon.com was founded by Jeff Bezos of Seattle, Washington, in July 1994. The business's original slogan was "Earth's biggest book store.".
"The Everything Store", Brad Stone's 2013 bestseller, reveals that Amazon.com almost went by the name "Cadabra", which is short for "abracadabra", which means magic. After learning that his lawyer had misheard the term as "cadaver" Bezos quickly changed the name to Amazon. Bezos chose to name the company after a river, for two reasons: to imply scale as the world's largest book shop, and because at that time, internet listings were frequently alphabetical.
Matchbox (Tinder)
Matchbox was the name of the ground-breaking dating app that Hatch Labs released in 2012, it was a subversive allusion to starting a romantic fire. But they chose to rename because the name unmistakably sounded too similar to Match.com. The name "Tinder" which refers to the dry substance used to start a fire, was chosen by the executives. The Milwaukee Business Journal quotes co-founder Jonathan Badeen as saying, "People will either get it and say, 'Oh—tinder: fire" or they won't get it and think it's some brilliant misuse of the term "tender".
Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation (IBM)
The Tabulating Machine Company, the International Time Recording Company, and the Computing Scale Company of America formed the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation in 1911. In 1914, Thomas J. Watson took over the business soon after these businesses merged. In order to signify the company's entry into the electric typewriter and other office machine markets, he chose to use the moniker "International Business Machines". In 1924, it evolved into the International Business Machines Corporation, or "IBM" that we know today. Up until the businesses were consolidated in 1933 and the holding company was disbanded, the individual companies carried on with their operations under their recognised names.
Phoenix (Firefox)
Phoenix was an experimental project that its creators, Dave Hyatt, Joe Hewitt, and Blake Ross, launched in 2002. Because the business "rose from the ashes" of Netscape Navigator, they came up with the moniker "Phoenix". Due to trademark disputes with Phoenix Technologies the year after, in 2003, it was renamed Firebird. In response to objections from the Firebird database software project in 2004, it was once more rebranded as Firefox. The designers had at last settled on a name they could truly keep. "It's simple to recall. It has good sound. It's special. We enjoy it." The business declared in a statement.
Sky Peer-to-Peer (Skype)
When the co-founders of the music sharing website Kazaa, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, originally published their video chatting programme in 2003, they curiously incorporated a significant amount of the Skype technology from their previous product Kazaa and dubbed it Sky Peer-to-Peer. But as soon as they realised they needed something more memorable, they tried to abbreviate the name to Skyper, and when they found the domain name was already taken, they finally decided on the name "Skype".
Confinity (PayPal)
In the small Californian hamlet of Palto Alto, founders Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, and Ken Howery established Confinity, a provider of security software, in 1998. Confidence and infinity are combined to form the word Confinity. After combining with Elon Musk's X.com, they developed PayPal a year later to enable users to send money over email. PayPal quickly established itself as the most user-friendly name. In June 2001, the corporation changed its name formally.
David's and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web (Yahoo)
Jerry Yang and David Filo, two electrical engineering graduate students at Stanford University, launched David's and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web in 1994. Just because they liked the way this word from the 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels sounded, they changed the name of the website to Yahoo a year later as it gained in popularity. Yahoo is an abbreviation for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" and it stands for that. Yang and Filo got the intriguing name right, but they had to add the exclamation point since a BBQ sauce manufacturer already owned the word "Yahoo."
AuctionWeb (eBay)
On September 3, 1995, French-born Iranian-American computer programmer Pierre Omidyar launched AuctionWeb with the goal of "bringing buyers and sellers together in an honest and open marketplace." said Omidyar. However, Mr. Omidyar had to deal with a PR crisis after the introduction of AuctionWeb, which erroneously claimed that Portal was founded so that his wife could collect Pez dispensers.
But, when Mr. Omidyar made his first transaction, the company had expanded beyond Omidyar's expectations and dominated a significant market, ranging from used apparel to online auctions, one-of-a-kind things, and rare antiquities. Later, he attempted to rename the domain to echobay.com in tribute to his consulting business, Echo Bay Technology Group. He shortened it to his second name eBay after he discovered that the domain had already been claimed by a gold-mining business called Echo Bay Mines.