1Instagram Stories
Mark Zuckerberg attempted to buy Snapchat for $3 billion in November of 2013 but was rejected. Almost 3 years later, Instagram cloned Snapchat’s main features and launched ‘Instagram Stories’.
2. In 2012, before the introduction of Uber, a Toronto Taxi license was sold for $360,000. By 2018, they were rumored to be down to $65,000 and likely still dropping. The New York City taxi medallions topped out at $1.3 million in 2013, and now are as low as $160,000.
3. HP founders, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, flipped a coin to decide whether their company would be named Hewlett-Packard (HP) or Packard-Hewlett (PH).
4. In late 2004, Samsung had the opportunity to buy Android but passed on the investment because they did not see any potential. Google acquired it two weeks later.
5. The reason all videos are subtitled on Netflix is that the National Association for the Deaf filed a class-action lawsuit against them in 2010.
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6William Shockley
William Shockley, a co-inventor of the transistor, decided to cease silicon-based research. The remaining researchers disagreed with him and went on to form Intel, AMD, and National Semiconductor.
7. In 2005, Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Intuit, and Pixar started a coordinated effort to push down their workers’ wages.
8. Facebook acquired Onavo VPN to track user's full online activity and app usage details. With this, they could tell that Instagram’s Stories crippled Snapchat Stories even before Snapchat made it public.
9. There is an extremely rare camera lens manufactured by Canon. It has 1200mm focal length and it costs roughly $90,000.
10. In 2010, Microsoft held a funeral to mark the death of the iPhone when it launched its own line of phones.
11Bar Codes
In 1973, IBM offered its UPC bar code proposal to the grocery industry for free. The industry accepted a very close standard to their proposal. However, IBM also made the first technology capable of reading the bar codes and made tons of money selling the equipment to grocery stores.
12. Snapchat was originally marketed as an app to send nude pictures called Picaboo.
13. Microsoft tried to monopolize the early web browser market by making it difficult to install other web browsers and slowing down Windows if Internet Explorer was uninstalled.
14. The term “iOS” does not belong to Apple but is instead licensed from Cisco, who owns the trademark.
15. Samsung originally sold noodles. It wasn't until 1970 that they started selling electronics.
16iPad
In 2002, Fujitsu made a device called the “iPad,” and Apple had to pay over $4 million to Fujitsu to buy the trademark rights.
17. Instagram started as a Whiskey meetup app. After analyzing how people used it, they relaunched it as Instagram and sold it for $1 billion 2 years later.
18. Sony has a patent on making viewers yell product names out loud to end TV ads.
19. Lenovo Computers is partially owned by the Chinese government and their computers come pre-loaded with secret back door access. As a result MI6, the CIA and other spy agencies have banned their use.
20. In April 2011, two competing algorithms on Amazon.com each kept altering the price that they were selling a book about flies for, based on how much the other was charging. After ten days of price warring, the price of the book had climbed to $23.7 million.
21Security Breach
After the 2012 security breaches, Sony changed Play Station user agreement to require users to agree not to sue Sony over any future security breach.
22. In some European markets, Netflix monitors illegal downloads to decide which shows to purchase.
23. In 2001, a South African company named Naspers decided to purchase a 46.5% stake into an up-and-coming Chinese tech company. This initial investment of $32 million into what would become Tencent has now ballooned to over $175 billion, making it one of the most successful investments in history.
24. The guy who snagged windows2000.com happened to be named Bob and Microsoft just happened to own Bob.com. They came to an agreement to trade one for the other.
25. When PayPal was started they gave $20 to everyone who made an account and $20 for every person they referred. This cost them 60-70 million dollars but they had 100,000 customers in the month PayPal went online.
