Nokia : Nokia started out as a wood pulp mill in the mid 1800′s.
Its second mill was built on a river called the Nokianvirta, and the Finnish company took part of the river’s name as its own.
EBay : eBay was supposed to be a much longer name: Echo Bay Technology Group
After being shortened to Echo Bay, the founder had to change it to eBay.com because, you guessed it, EchoBay was taken.
Skype : Originally Sky-Peer-to-Peer, it became Skyper but had to do away with the r since the name had already been taken.
Samsung : Sam was three and sung was stars. In Korean, the three points towards "big", "numerous" and "powerful".
Samsung has big ambitions.
Wikipedia : Wiki meant "quick" in Hawaiian and the word was actually a mash-up with part of the word encyclopedia.
Amazon : The founder elected for something "exotic and different" and chose Amazon, pulling references between the big Amazon river and what he envisions his company to be – real big.
Twitter : It was between status, jitter and twitch, but when the founders saw the definition for twitter as they moved down the dictionary entries, they knew they had found a winner – "short burst of inconsequential information, and chirps from birds".
Tumblr : When the founders noticed a shift from blogging to tumblelogs: shorter posts bearing mixed media, they were inspired to call their platform Tumblr.
Instagram : They wanted a name to describe the act of ‘recording’ something ‘right here, right now’.
