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Trademark Trivia

eBay

Pierre Omidyar, who created eBay, had a web consulting business called Echo Bay Technology Group, named that because he thought it sounded "cool." But when he tried to register EchoBay.com, it was already taken by Echo Bay Mines which mines gold. So he registered it as eBay.

Google

Google is a take off of the word googol, which is 1 followed by 100 zeros (ten raised to the power of a hundred). It was a reflection of their mission to organize enormous amounts of information.

Google was originally called "BackRub."

Amazon

Jeff Bezos changed the name of his company from Cadabra.com to Amazon.com after the world's largest river. It is said that he did that so that Yahoo would always list it first, since they listed alphabetically.

Häagen-Dazs

Häagen-Dazs is not a European name. It is two made up words, meant to sound European to Americans. This practice is known as branding in the marketing industry.

Adidas

Adidas is from the name of its founder, Adolf (Adi) Dassler.

Coca Cola

John S. Pemberton named his creation "Coca Cola" after two if its ingredients, the coca leaves and kola nuts. He changed the "C" to "K" to make it look better.

Coca Cola was originally green.

Kodak

George Eastman's favorite letter was "K." He thought is was a strong, incisive letter. He tried many combinations of letters which began and ended in "K." He chose Kodak because it could not be mispronounced, it had the merits of a trademark name and did not resemble anything in art. A common misconception is that the word came from the sound the shutter of the camera made.

IKEA

IKEA's founder, Ingvar Kamprad of Sweden, got the name from his initials, his family's farm, called Elmtaryd and the nearby village of Agunnaryd. In the US, it stands for Ingvar Kamprad's Economical Alternative.

Motorola

Motorola's first product was a record player for cars! At that time, Victrola was the most well known producers of record players. Hence, they named themselves "Motorola."