Let’s go back in time when Amazon was just starting out as a bookstore, and Samsung was just a guy with a phone. Let’s watch these big companies take their first steps towards fame.
After World War II, Sony founder Masaru Ibuka invented a product to try and serve millions of homes that had electricity but lacked the equipment to use. As a result, the rice cooker was born.
Released under the business name of the Tokyo Telecommunications Research Institute, before Sony became an established company, the rice cooker consisted of just a handful of aluminum electrodes at the bottom of a wooden bucket. The doneness and palatability of the rice depends on the current not being adjusted at the time and the type of rice or the amount of water used, the rice often becomes mushy or undercooked.
As a result, the product never actually hit the market. Instead, the prototype is now on display in a glass case at the Sony Archives in Shinagawa, a “relic” from a time long before electronics were more standardly manufactured.
Amazon started as an online bookstore in 1994. Founder Jeff Bezos first decided to call the bookstore “Cadabra”, a few months later he changed the name to Amazon.com, Inc., after being hit by a the lawyer misheard its original name as “corpse”.
Bezos chose the name Amazon by looking through a dictionary; he settled in “Amazon” because it was a “strange and different” place, just as he envisioned his Internet business. He noted that the Amazon river is the largest river in the world and he plans to make his store the largest bookstore in the world. Also, a name starting with “A” is preferred because it can be at the top of an alphabetized list.
Nintendo, the video game franchise that launched franchises from the 1980s and ’90s like Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Pokemon, was founded in 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi as a card game company. based in Kyoto, Japan.
The cards (named hanafuda, or “flower cards” for their ornate floral images) are popular among the organized crime gangs that inhabit Japanese casinos. Copy.
The company’s origins are even reflected in its name: When separated into three characters, “Nin-ten-do” roughly translates to “Good Luck from Heaven” , or “Hard Work, But in the end it’s in the hands of God.”
LEGO is a famous toy brand with plastic interlocking bricks founded by a carpenter – Ole Kirk Christiansen.
Struggling to find enough wood to make furniture during the Danish Depression of the 1930s, Ole Kirk Kristiansen began turning wood scraps into children’s toys. Some of LEGO’s early products included a toy train, a car, and a wooden duck with wheels that rolled when pulled.
When he started experimenting with plastic toys in 1947, most department stores didn’t care. Fortunately for future generations of LEGO builders, that didn’t deter him, and plastic bricks eventually became the focus of the company.
IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad showed a passion for business from a young age. At the age of 5, he started buying matches in bulk from Stockholm and selling them to neighbors for a profit. After that, he switched to selling flower seeds, greeting cards, Christmas tree decorations…
In 1943, at the age of 17, Kamprad founded IKEA from his uncle’s kitchen table. It started as a mail-order business, selling a variety of items such as socks, jewelry, watches, pens, and photo frames.
Kamprad added the first piece of furniture to the company’s products a few years later. Furniture sales got even bigger with the introduction of the popular IKEA catalog in 1951 and the first showroom in 1953. IKEA furniture quickly became the focus of the company as the assortment began drop all other products for the next few years.
Starting out, Steve Wozniak assembled the Apple I microcomputer in 1975 for a Homebrew Computer Club meeting in Silicon Valley. Wozniak says the machine was essentially “the first time in history that someone typed a character on a keyboard and saw it show up on their computer screen right in front of them”.
Another member of the club, Steve Jobs, helped sell 50 orders of the machine for 0 to a local computer store. The success of the sales made the couple more than ,000 and encouraged them to get to work on the Apple II.
Toyota was founded in 1926 as Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, Ltd. by Sakichi Toyoda, who invented a series of hand and machine-powered looms. The most impressive of these are the Toyoda Automatic Loom, type G, a fully automatic high-speed loom capable of changing shuttles without stopping, and dozens of other innovations. At the time, it was the most advanced loom in the world, offering a significant improvement in quality and a 20-fold increase in productivity.
In 2007, this machine was registered as category 16 in the Mechanical Engineering Heritage of Japan as “a landmark achievement that has elevated the global textile industry and laid the foundation for for the growth of the Toyota Group”.
Google has its origins in “BackRub”, a research project started in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while both were PhD students at Stanford University in Stanford, California. The original project also featured the unofficial “third founder”, Scott Hassan, the lead programmer, who wrote much of the code for the original Google Search engine, but left before Google officially incorporated as a company.
Page’s “web crawler” began exploring the web in March 1996, with its own Stanford homepage as the only starting point.
The first version of Google was released in August 1996 on the Stanford website. It used almost half of Stanford’s network bandwidth.
Samsung was founded as a grocery store on March 1, 1938, by Lee Byung-Chull. He started a business in Taegu, South Korea, dealing in noodles and other items produced in and around the city, exported to China and the city’s provinces.
After the Korean War and in the process of accelerating the country’s industrialization, the company successfully expanded into the textile manufacturing sector.
New subsidiaries such as Samsung Heavy Industries, Samsung Shipbuilding and Samsung Precision Company also quickly followed.
Samsung first entered the electronics industry in 1969 with several electronics-focused divisions – their first product being a black and white TV. During the 1970s, the company began to export household electronic products abroad.
In 1937, Patrick McDonald opened “The Airdrome” , a food stall, on Huntington Drive (66th Street) near Monrovia Airport in Monrovia, California with hot dogs being one of the first items sold.
Burgers were then added to the menu for 10 cents, accompanied by an all-you-can-drink orange juice for 5 cents. In 1940, sons Maurice and Richard moved the entire building to San Bernardino, California. The restaurant was renamed “McDonald’s Bar-B-Que” and had 25 items on the menu, mostly kebabs.
In 1954, Ray Kroc, a salesman of the Prince Castle brand of Multimixers, learned that the McDonald brothers were using eight of his machines in their San Bernardino restaurant. He was very curious and he went to look at the restaurant. He was joined by good friend Charles Lewis, who suggested to Kroc some improvements to the McDonald’s burger recipe.
Kroc was so impressed by the brothers’ restaurant that he suggested starting a national franchise, starting with the “original” Mcdonalds (as we know them today) in Des Plaines, Illinois, near Chicago. . It started with a simple 9-course menu that included burgers, fries, milkshakes, juices, and milkshakes.
Intel was founded in Mountain View, California, in 1968 by Gordon E. Moore (known for “Moore’s law”) , a chemist, and Robert Noyce, a physicist and co-inventor of integrated circuits. .
When Intel started, they didn’t make microprocessors, as they are famous now, they made memory. Namely SRAM, DRAM and EPROM. The first product Intel released, in April 1969, was the 64-bit 3101 SRAM. It is performed on the new and fast Schottky Bipolar process. This makes it very fast (access time is 60ns) but very power-hungry. It drains 525mW, more than half a watt, for 64 bit memory.
PayPal was first founded in December 1998 as Confinity, a company that developed secure software for handheld devices. Confinity was founded by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, Ken Howery, Yu Pan and Russel Simmons.
PayPal was developed and launched as a money transfer service at Confinity in 1999.
In March 2000, Confinity merged with X.com, an online banking company founded by Elon Musk. Musk is optimistic about the future success of the money transfer business that Confinity is developing.
In October of that year, Musk made the decision that X.com would end its other online banking operations and focus on the PayPal money transfer service. The X.com company was then renamed PayPal in 2001 and expanded rapidly throughout the year until company executives decided to take PayPal public in 2002.
Twitter got its start in 2006 when podcasting company Odeo realized they needed to reinvent themselves and start brainstorming new creative ideas. Jack Dorsey introduced the idea of creating an SMS that would allow users to communicate in a small group.
Twitter was first called “status” until the team looked up the name in the dictionary and found twitter that perfectly matched it. The original product name was twttr.
The project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message: “just set up my twttr”. The prototype for twitter was tested as an internal service for Odeo employees but was later released to the public in July 2006.
In October 2006, Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams founded the Obvious Group with other members from Odeo. They then acquired Odeo from other investors and shareholders. In April 2007, Twitter became its own company.
Alice Comedies is an animated series created by Walt Disney in the 1920s in which a real-life girl named Alice (originally played by Virginia Davis) and a cartoon cat named Julius go on adventures. save in an animated scene.
Disney, Ub Iwerks, and their staff made the first Alice comedy, a one-reel (ten-minute) short titled Alice’s Wonderland, while still running the ongoing Laugh-O-Gram Studios. failed in Kansas City, Missouri.
After completing the film, the studio went bankrupt and was forced to close. After making money as a freelance photographer, Disney bought a one-way train ticket to Los Angeles, California to live with his uncle Robert and brother Roy.
In California, Disney continued to submit proposals for the Alice series, hoping to secure a distribution deal, which was eventually arranged through Winkler Pictures, led by Margaret J. Winkler and her fiancé, Charles Mintz operating.
The first Starbucks store opened in Seattle, Washington, on March 31, 1971, by three partners who met while students at the University of San Francisco: English teacher Jerry Baldwin, history teacher Zev Siegl and writer Gordon Bowker were inspired to sell high-quality coffee beans and equipment by roaster Alfred Peet after he taught them his style of roasting.
The founders pondered over a list of words starting with “st”, and eventually landed on “Starbo”, a mining town in the Cascade Range. From there, the group remembers “Starbuck”, the name of the mate in the book Moby-Dick. Moby-Dick isn’t directly related to Starbucks, says Bowker, it’s just coincidental that the sound seems to make sense. “
The first Starbucks store was located in Seattle at 2000 Western Avenue from 1971-1976. This cafe was later moved to 1912 Pike Place. During this time, the company only sells whole roasted and ground coffee beans and does not yet brew coffee for sale. In the first year of operation, they bought green coffee beans from Peet’s, then started buying directly from growers.
Nike’s origins can be traced back to a school article devoted to a small entrepreneurial class.
Phil Knight enrolled at Stanford Graduate School of Business when he had the idea for a Japanese shoe company to produce quality products at a lower cost than the German brands that were dominating the market at the time. there.
The subject of his essay was titled “What Can Japanese Sneakers Do to German Sports Shoes, What Did Japanese Cameras Do to German Cameras?” inspired him to start an actual business in 1964.
Nike – then Blue Ribbon Sports – started as a distributor for the Japanese-made Onitsuka Tiger Running Shoe. Initially, Knight sold the shoes himself from the back of his station wagon at the University of Oregon track meeting.
Facebook was first known as FaceMash and was founded in 2003 by Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg wrote the software for the website Facemash when he was in his sophomore year of college.
The site was set up as a sort of “hot or not” game for Harvard students. The site allows visitors to compare two schoolgirl photos side by side and let them decide which one is hot or not.
After much popularity and controversy, the site was expanded by Zuckerberg, along with Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, and renamed TheFacebook in 2004.
Initially, the founders limited membership to Harvard students, but it was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and gradually most universities in the United States. United States and Canada, corporations, and through September 2006, to everyone with a valid email address with age requirement 13 or older.