YouTube turned 5

5 years ago when Yakov Lapitzy pointed a video camera at his friend Jawed Karim standing in front of two elephants at the San Diego Zoo and hit the record button, he not just recorded another video but he made history which was the first video ("Me at the Zoo") to go online on YouTube,

Five years time-line of YouTube

Three former PayPal employees created YouTube in February 2005. In November 2006, YouTube was bought by Google. Its Slogan is "Broadcast Yourself".

To celebrate the occasion, YouTube added a candle in the shape of a five to its logo. Additionally, the company launched an official YouTube Five Year channel, which contains the “My YouTube Story” — a project that includes videos of people from many places describing how YouTube has changed their lives. The channel also features some of the most popular videos in the history of the site.

Video sharing website YouTube now gets more than two billion hits daily

Harrods

London department store Harrods has been sold by its owner Mohammed Al Fayed to the Qatari royal family for £1.5bn. Recognized for its celebrity-endorsed sales, food hall and signature green bags, Harrods is one of the world's largest and most famous department stores. With more than a million square feet (90,000 sq m) of space, Harrods sells luxury and everyday items across seven floors and 330 departments.

Its motto is Omnia Omnibus Ubique - All Things for All People, Everywhere

The Knightsbridge store was established in 1849 by Charles Henry Harrod. Beginning in a single room and employing two assistants and a messenger boy, it mainly sold tea and groceries. Harrods steadily expanded, and by 1880 was a thriving department store, offering everything from medicines and perfumes to clothing and food. Its expansion suffered a knock in 1883 when a fire destroyed the store. This did not halt the owners, however, who duly rebuilt the store, with the help of architect Charles William Stephens, into what it is today. Harrods became a public company in 1889 and by the 1890s it had established a bank and estate agency and a department selling exotic pets that lasted until the 1970s. It featured one of the world's first escalators in 1898.

During World War II, the store transformed itself from selling luxury goods to making uniforms, parachutes and parts for Lancaster bombers. In 1959, High Street department store group House of Fraser bought Harrods.

In 1985 the store returned to private ownership when Egypt-born Mr Al Fayed and his brother Ali bought House of Fraser for £615m, snatching it from mining conglomerate Lonrho. The takeover bid was bitterly fought as Mr Al Fayed had previously served on Lonrho's board but left nine months later after a disagreement. Lonrho's director, the late Tiny Rowland, took his campaign against the takeover to the Department of Trade who duly held an inquiry.

Dress code

The store controversially introduced a dress code in 1989 which included a ban on wearing high-cut, Bermuda or beach shorts; swimwear; cycling shorts and flip flops or thong sandals.

Brand Profile: The Body Shop

Anita Roddick, (23 October 1942 – 10 September 2007) was a British businesswoman born as Anita Lucia Perilli in a bomb shelter in Littlehampton, Sussex, in an Italian immigrant community. In 2003, Queen Elizabeth II appointed Roddick a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

In the early 1970s, Anita Roddick visited a shop called The Body Shop in Berkeley, California run by Peggy Short and Jane Saunders. This inspired her to open her own shop back in the UK. In 1987, Anita purchased the naming rights from the original Body Shop. Its stock was floated on London's Unlisted Securities Market in April 1984, opening at 95p. After its full listing on the London Stock Exchange, the stock was given the nickname "The shares that defy gravity," as its price increased by more than 500%.

          The company created a doll in the likeness of Barbie but with a lifelike voluptuous figure and luxuriant red hair, that came with the tag line, "There are 3 billion women who don't look like supermodels and only 8 who do" Her name was Ruby, a real-life size 16 plastic doll that Mattel thought looked too much like Barbie.

In 1993, She told in an interview to Third Way Magazine:-

"The original Body Shop was a series of brilliant accidents. It had a great smell, it had a funky name. It was positioned between two funeral parlours--that always caused controversy. It was incredibly sensuous. It was 1976, the year of the heat wave, so there was a lot of flesh around. We knew about storytelling then, so all the products had stories. We recycled everything, not because we were environmentally friendly, but because we didn’t have enough bottles. It was a good idea. What was unique about it, with no intent at all, no marketing nous, was that it translated across cultures, across geographical barriers and social structures. It wasn’t a sophisticated plan, it just happened like that."

Brand Profile: Mazda

The Japanese Mazda was founded in 1920 by  Matsuda Jyujiro, initially under the name of Toyo Cork Kogyo Co. In 1927 the brand changed its name to Toyo Kogyo Co.  Slowly they diversifying its production and manufacture first motorcycle and, later, small tricycles for urban freight transport and in 1931 began to produce Mazdago, a three-wheeled wagon.

The word Mazda is a blend of the name of the brand's founder, Matsuda Jyujiro ("tsu" in Japanese is pronounced "Z") and the Assyrian god Mazda.

Ahura Mazda is the abstract and transcendant god of Zoroastrianism. Ahura is the adversary of Angra Mainyu, the Zoroastrian representation of evil. Ahura has no image and cannot be represented in any form . Ahura Mazda, derived from the Old Persian Aura-Mazda ("Aura" - Lord, "Mazda" - Wisdom) symbolizes the supreme deity of Zoroastrian and Mazdean religions.
Ahura Mazda is refered to as Ormazd in modern Persian.


During World War II the brand started to produce weapons for the Japanese army, leaving the Type 99 rifle widely known.  Mazda's first vehicle to be produced was the sporty Mazda R360 coupe launched in 1960, followed by the Mazda Carol in 1962.

Like other Japanese brands, Mazda began its expansion in the late sixties. With Carol and Family models fully consolidated in the domestic market, the company began exporting in 1967 the first units to Europe, and three years after the United States.

Logo
The brand logo has changed a lot. The latter, which represents two wings, dating from 1997. Coincidence or not, 3,500 years ago, the symbol of Mazda, the only god of the Assyrian religion, or Zoroastrianism, also were two wings.

Current Logo: Capturing the spirit of Mazda, the stylised “M” evokes an image of wings in flight and symbolises the Mazda’s flight toward the future. The “V” in the centre of the “M” spreads out like an opening fan, representing the creativity, vitalty, flexibilty and passion that is Mazda. The symbol as a whole expresses the sharp, solid feeling that Mazda will be seeking in all of its products. The dynamic circle symbolises our readiness to spread our wings as we enter the 21st century.

Absolut Vodka and advertising

The roots of vodka
The history of vodka in Sweden dates back to 400 years ago in the early sixteenth century when people began to distill grain alcohol for medicinal purposes and also to make gunpowder for cannons and rifles used by the Swedes in their frequent conflicts with neighboring countries. However, human nature will quickly find more recreational use to "bränvin"-meaning burnt wine, "and then in the seventeenth century, was made home, even in the humblest cottage, acquiring the status of a national drink, but of very uneven quality because of its homemade.

Lars Olsson Smith, the King of Vodka
Entrepreneur at age 14, the Swede Lars Olsson Smith already controlled one third of the domestic market of vodka when he was a teenager. He became known as the "King of Vodka", appeal it held for nearly half a century. In 1869 he built the country's largest distillery in Reimersholme, an island which now forms part of the city of Stockholm, and began producing a new type of vodka with a refined and pure flavor with a revolutionary method of a process to distill spirits from wheat, called rectification ... method is still used today.
The story of the Absolut Vodka advertising campaign was born in the late 1970s when the brand presents the challenge of conquering the American market, consumer 60% of global vodka market. Competing against less expensive brands of domestic production for local consumption -99%, and the exotic Russian Stolichnaya - which dominated the imported-Absolut enters the U.S. market in 1981 with a pack inspired by a Swedish medicine bottle of the last century, a label transparent and a name that eludes understanding. With such a range of elements seemingly against him, the media campaign had to be very special. The relationship with TBWA started on the eve of the launch of Absolut in Boston, USA when his then U.S. distributor, Carillon Importers, won the attention of all advertising of alcohol products to the agency.
Faced with limited knowledge of Swedish culture and identity, the TBWA team had to establish the concept that Absolut vodka was the best verbatim without affirming. They did it with Absolut Perfection, combining excellence with humor in such a simple concept like infinity which would mark the next 15 years of creativity.
Geoff Hayes, art director of the agency, discovered the concept while watching television at home one night, idly doodling in his notebook ... bottles above a drew a halo, like an angel and wrote down: "Absolut. The perfect vodka. " The next day, his colleague Graham Turner, suggested to be left, quite simply, as "Absolut Perfection" ...
This was the basis of the formula of two words that somehow praising the product or the person taking it. Also it was the touch of humor that remained arrogance implicit declaration of superiority.
The first attempts to photograph the bottle failed utterly, with results showing a flat, white object without grace or beauty. Finally, the creative team came up with a then unknown photographer, Steve Bronstein, who was able to resolve the problem of how to photograph an object whose main attraction lay in its clarity and transparency. Instead of using a black background, placed a plastic sheet behind semi-transparent bottle, lit by a dim light that left the bottle three-round and clear in the photo.

Series and variants that maintain the freshness of the brand
Using these same criteria of quality and imagination, the TBWA team developed other variants such as:
Absolut Cities: subtly transforming a known feature of a city in a notice to remind the bottle, it appears as the arches of the famous Brooklyn Bridge in the notice of the same name or the shape of Central Park in Manhattan Absolut. Later in 1993, appeared Absolut Eurocities series under the same concept, a flock of pigeons clustered on the bottle shape in the Piazza San Marco in Absolut Venice, one piece of the Wall in Absolut, and entry into the Tivoli Gardens in Absolut Copenhagen, among others.

Absolut Art: Absolut has worked with leading artists from around the world to produce works inspired by the bottle as Keith Haring and George Rodrigue.

Absolut Holidays: Christmas of 1987, the TBWA’s creative team was invited to the prestigious New York magazine to propose ideas for a special announcement. During that year, they had surpassed the Stolichnaya brand in sales, and expected an explosive consumption boom for the holidays.

Absolut Fashion: David Cameron was the first fashion designer who was inspired by the clarity and unity of design of the bottle. In 1987 he opened a silver mini dress simple but attractive lines that was modeled by Rachel Williams and photographed by Steve Bronstein.
Absolut Film & Literature: In 1994, they launched a series of three ads - Wells Absolut, Absolut and Absolut Shelley Stoker, paying homage to the three great writers HG Wells (The Invisible Man), Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) and Bram Stoker ( Dracula).

Father of PC - A Legacy

The "father of the personal computer" who kick-started the careers of Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen has died at the age of 68.

Dr Henry Edward Roberts was the inventor of the Altair 8800, a machine that sparked the home computer era.

Gates and Allen contacted Dr Roberts after seeing the machine on the front cover of a magazine and offered to write software for it.The program was known as Altair-Basic, the foundation of Microsoft's business.

"Ed was willing to take a chance on us - two young guys interested in computers long before they were commonplace - and we have always been grateful to him," the Microsoft founders said in a statement.

"The day our first untested software worked on his Altair was the start of a lot of great things."

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak told technology website CNET that Dr Roberts had taken " a critically important step that led to everything we have today".

'Fond memories'

Dr Roberts was the founder of Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), originally set up to sell electronics kits to model rocket hobbyists.

The company went on to sell electronic calculator kits, but was soon overshadowed by bigger firms.

In the mid-1970's, with the firm struggling with debt, Dr Roberts began to develop a computer kit for hobbyists.

The result was the Altair 8800, a machine operated by switches and with no display.

It took its name from the then-cutting edge Intel 8080 microprocessor.

The $395 kit (around £1,000 today) was featured on the cover of Popular Electronics in 1975, prompting a flurry of orders. It was also sold assembled for an additional $100 charge.

Amongst those interested in the machine were Paul Allen and Bill Gates.

The pair contacted Dr Roberts, offering to write software code that would help people program the machine.

The pair eventually moved to Albuquerque - the home of MITS - where they founded Micro-Soft, as it was then known, to develop their software: a variant of the Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (Basic).

"We will always have many fond memories of working with Ed in Albuquerque, in the MITS office right on Route 66 - where so many exciting things happened that none of us could have imagined back then," the pair said.

Dr Roberts sold his company in 1977.

He died in hospital on 1 April after a long bout of pneumonia.

HISTORY OF BLOGGER

As we all know, Blogger.com was a brain child of Evans Williams . A little historical and motivational account about him follows:

Evans Williams is entrepreneurial by nature. He didn't take up a fixed job any time in his life. Even dropped out of Google in 2004 to start his podcasting company odeo, when Google had bought out his Pyra labs in 2003. At Pyra labs the initial idea was to build up a project management software but as time passed it ended up with blogger.

The whole story of Pyra Labs and blogger is a one man's fight for his destiny and his only weapon being his optimism and a motivation subconsciously, to not quit this time in the middle as he had done many times earlier.

Blogger started in times when there was a boom in internet, but soon the boom turned bust and by that time it had many registered users and thus the it was becoming continually difficult to ensure best services to the increasing consumer base. At this time the users themselves contributed in bits and pieces to keep their blogs afloat. When later blogger had 1 million registered users it caught the attention of Google which carried out its first acquisition of Pyra Labs!

Blogger's first page as on 1999

Pfizer - Company history

(Charles Erhart Above and Charles Pfizer below)

A year after his arrival in New York from Germany in 1848, a chemist Charles Pfizer along with his cousin, Charles Erhart confectioner, based in Brooklyn found a company. Pfizer and Company Inc.., A company specializing in chemicals, including tartar, borax and camphor refined. The first drug substance manufactured by the company, santonin, was used as an anthelmintic.

During the Second World War a drug used to treat infections was in great demand and was in dire need. In 1928, in London, Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. But without a method to synthesize large quantities, it remained a mere laboratory curiosity.In 1942, Pfizer leveraged its expertise in fermentation to become the first to achieve mass production of this drug. Shortly after landing in Normandy, it became the panacea to cure the Allied forces and the world was propelled into the era of modern medicine.

Cadillac, a tribute to a French adventurer

The American brand is named after a French adventurer Antoine Laumet. Sent by Louis XIV in the Americas, he arrived in Acadia in 1683 and took the title Laumet Sieur de Lamothe Cadillac. In 1701, he founded Fort Pontchartrain, Detroit today, the capital of the U.S. auto industry.
In 1902, in gratitude, the builder Henry Leland and William H. Murphy - the shareholder of Henry Ford - founded the Cadillac brand. In 1909, they sell to Billy Durant (founder of GM and Chevrolet).

Company History 9: American Airlines

In 1926, Charles A. Lindbergh was the chief pilot of Robertson Aircraft Corporation, which was based at an airfield in Forest Park. Soon Robertson Aircraft Corporation and about 85 other small airline companies were consolidated in 1929 and 1930 into the Aviation Corporation, which eventually formed American Airways, the immediate predecessor of today’s American Airlines. It was in 1934 that the company reorganized American Airways and became American Airlines, Inc. Not long after, American developed an air traffic control system that would later be used by all airlines and administered by the U.S. government. The company also introduced the first domestic scheduled U.S. freight service in 1944.

On April 15, 1926, Charles Lindbergh flew the first leg of the first round trip Chicago to St. Louis airmail flight. Flying the airmail was a dangerous business and Lindbergh had to jump from more than one aircraft because of weather or mechanical difficulties. This flight is considered to have been first start of American Airlines’ long history.

Company History 8: America Online

Stephen Case, America Online Inc.’s founder was a development manager at Pizza Hut when he became interested in a new online service called Source in the early 1980s. His interest led him to Control Video, a company that ran an online service for those using Atari computer games. In 1985, after financial struggles, the company was renamed Quantum Computer Services and began a new service called Q-Link, an online service for those using Commodore computers. By 1987 Quantum made agreements with Apple and Tandy due to Q-Link’s popularity, and a service called America Online was introduced in 1989 for IBM-compatible and Apple computers. Quantum Computer Services changed its name in 1991 to America Online.

The POST-IT Notes Story

Art Fry, the inventor of Post-It Notes, used 3M’s famed 15–percent rule to develop a bookmark he could use for his choir book. Needing a placeholder that would stick temporarily without ripping the pages, he heard of a 3M adhesive developed by Dr. Spence Silver that did not stick to a surface permanently. Working with developers in engineering and production, they developed a unique coating process that would apply the nonsticky adhesive to the back of small pieces of paper. Once the prototype was in place, Fry used company employees to test his bookmark. Initial feedback was not reassuring as critics thought they were too frivolous and expensive. It was only after receiving a letter with his “bookmark” used to add scribbled comments, that Fry realized he hadn’t invented a bookmark but rather a new way to communicate or organize information.

D Peppers Pepsin Bitters

D Peppers Pepsin Bitters' is suppose to be the-secret-formula for Dr. Pepper, recently made public by Bill Waters.

He bought it for $200, suspecting he could resell it for five times that. Turns out, his inkling about the book's value was more spot on than he knew. The Tulsa, Okla., man eventually discovered the book came from the Waco, Texas, drugstore where Dr Pepper was invented and includes a recipe titled "D Peppers Pepsin Bitters."

However, the maker of the soft drink says it's not the secret formula, but that hasn't stopped the book from generating interest at an upcoming auction.

The Man Time Forgot

TIME's first issue appeared on March 2, 1923 and was founded by Briton Hadden and Henry Luce, but after Hadden's death in 1929, Luce became the owner of the magazine and is considered one of the most important man in history of the media of the twentieth century. However many felt that TIME, almost forgot Hadden, so here is an interesting book on this topic. After all it wasn’t until after Luce’s death, in 1967, that Hadden’s name was restored to its place at the top of Time’s masthead.

It was Hadden, Time’s creative genius and editor, who would shape the style in which Americans think about and tell the news. In doing so, he set the foundation for the newspaper and magazine chains, radio and television networks, cable stations and Internet sites that have come to occupy a prominent place in the national culture.
Hadden told the news just as he viewed it—as a grand and comic epic spectacle. He hooked readers on the news and sold them on its importance by flavoring the facts with color and detail, and by painting vivid portraits of the people who made headlines. Offended by Luce’s desire for power, Hadden had been further depressed by a string of romantic failures. In his final few years, he had turned to the bottle, driven drunk through town, picked fights in speakeasies, and spent nights in jail.
Hadden had once said of their strange friendship. “No matter how hard I run, Luce is
always there.” Now Luce was at Hadden’s deathbed, ready to slog out the final grueling lap of their rivalry.
For several months Luce had been developing a plan to publish the company’s second major product—a business magazine to be called Fortune. Hadden was opposed. Believing the business world to be vapid and morally bankrupt, he had devoted the last few years to lampooning businessmen in print, even when they happened to be Time’s own advertisers. Luce was adamant. He kept coming to Hadden’s bedside, discussing draft articles and mock-ups. Hadden, true to form, had been drawn into a series of lengthy arguments. Day after day, Hadden and Luce had yelled at each other—so loudly that Hadden’s nurse could hear them from behind the closed door.

Hadden, left, and Luce, center, in 1925.

Prehistory of Michelin

The present Michelin Company dates back to 1829 when Édouard Daubrée marries a Scott, Elizabeth Pugh Barker niece of the scientist Charles Macintosh, who discovered the solubility of rubber in benzene.
The Daubrées family had created their fortune in trade – notably the sugar trade, which collapsed during the Napoleonic Wars with the crippling blockade against French shipping. He was soon joined by Aristide Barbier, a distant cousin and also a close friend.
Whatever else she brought to the marriage as dowry, Elizabeth Daubrée apparently was the niece – at any rate she had grown up in the shadow – of Charles Macintosh, the Scot who made rubber work for him at a time (1823) when inventors and entrepreneurs were looking for ways to manipulate the strange substance, and then to find practical uses for it. A little later, the miraculous process known as vulcanization – essentially the application of heat and sulphur to transform crude rubber into something at once stronger and more pliable – created an industry.
A decade and a half before this process was tried and proved successful, Macintosh had begun to strip off slices of crude rubber – hardened latex – to dissolve it in low-boiling naphtha, encasing it between layers of fabric to produce waterproof clothing material. By 1824 he was running a company bearing his name to make and sell his patented rainwear. Still later, his genial creation would be known universally as the ‘mackintosh’.

It was a rough moment in the Industrial Revolution. There was a race to be the first to file a patent, another race to be the first to exploit new and potentially profitable manufacturing processes. In 1839 Charles Goodyear first stumbled upon the vulcanization process that was to make all the difference, yet he had not had the business sense to nail down his patent in time. He even thought he could keep the discovery to himself while he negotiated its sale, letting samples get out of his hands, at which point a clever Englishman, Thomas Hancock, unravelled his secret by sniffing out the sulphur in it – and filed his own patent for vulcanization a year ahead of Goodyear’s (in 1843, to be precise). Goodyear fought back, threatening legal action if Europeans violated his rights. French rubber-makers who ignored Goodyear’s moral priority were taken to court, their defence led by none other than Aristide Barbier – armed with his legal background – and they won – in France at least; the year was 1854.

The original Barbier–Daubrée combination worked like a charm until the end, but the end always comes. They even died in harmony – Aristide Barbier in 1863 and Edouard Daubrée just a year later, having ensured the succession as best they could – given that Daubrée left two sons and widower Barbier two daughters. Of the Daubrée sons the elder, Ernest, already 34 years old at his father’s death, seemed to give the better guarantee that he could handle the succession. But now there was – or could be – a male pretender on the Barbier side. During the early years of the Clermont-Ferrand adventure Aristide’s daughters Emilie and Adèle had lived in Paris, raised by the sister of their long-departed mother. The story goes that when they were of the age to marry, the daughters had access to the best drawing rooms. But it was in Clermont-Ferrand that Aristide eventually found a man for Emilie, who by then was 24 years old. The prospective husband, a recent widower, son of a property lawyer, was himself a lawyer. And it was still further away from Paris – in Luz, a spa in the Pyrenees frequented by Aristide Barbier in his late and prosperous years – that his second daughter Adèle (then a ripe 21) was first seen in the company of a gentleman named Jules Michelin (a dozen years her senior).


Text taken from ( The Michelin Men - Driving an Empire, by I.B. Tauris)

Company History 7: BMW- Ultimate Driving Machine

It was founded by Karl Friedrich Rapp and Gustav Otto after the merger of two manufacturers of airplane engines in the city of Munich: a Rapp-Motorenwerke and Gustav Otto Flugmaschinfabrik. The Rapp-engine works themselves began in 1913 at Munich, started to build aircraft engines for Austria in anticipation of World War I. Rapp-Motorenwerke's top customer was Franz Josef Popp, general inspector of Emperor Franz Josef's army. Popp hired Max Friz, an aircraft engine designer from Austro-Daimler; together in Munich they established Bayerische Motoren Werke based on the engineering ideas of Rapp.
The First World War brought rapid growth to the company, which soon built large facilities to the east of the former airfield of Oberwiesenfeld in Munich. Until 1918, supplied engines for military aircraft. However the twist in the tale came in with the Treaty of Versailles, signed after the World War I, when Germany was banned to manufacture aircraft engines for five years. BMW then began to provide four-cylinder engines for trucks and boats.

The company's interests in motorcycle manufacture developed rapidly in the early 1920s. The first model, the R32, consisted of a flat twin engine and drive shaft housed in a double-tube frame, with valves in an inverted arrangement to keep the oil clean. Designed by engineer Max Fritz, bike debuted in the salons of Paris and Berlin. This model had the basic characteristics of future bike brand: of 2 cylinder boxer engine and transmission secondary axle card.
Franz-Josef Popp was the first Director General and CEO of BMW.













Key Dates:

1913: Inventor Karl Rapp opens an aircraft design shop.
1917: Rapp's original business leads to the formation of Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, under the direction of Franz Josef Popp and Max Friz.
1918: First BMW aircraft engine is built.
1929: First BMW car is built.

Trivia: The nomenclature
BMW uses 3 numeric digits followed by one or two letters to identify their models. The first number is the number of cars. The next two numbers represent the engine displacement in liters multiplied by 10. The letters mean: d = diesel, petrol = i; x = all wheel drive, long wheel base l = c = par. For example, the model 760il car is a series of 7, moved to the 6.0l engine with petrol.

Company History 6: Fanta

Fanta was created in 1942-1943, during World War II when Max Keith, who was handling the operations of Coca-Cola in Germany during the war, ran out the, which could only be supplied from the United States. Keith Fanta, which proved a success, as Coca-Cola was reestablished after the war, adopted the Fanta brand.
The name 'Fanta' was suggested by a vendor Joe Knipp. His idea came through a competition that the company proposed to the employees in Germany, to name the product, in which Keith told them to let their 'Phantasie' (German for "imagination") run wild. The first soda had yellow and light flavor of apple, made from apple fibres.
Fanta has been positioned in a segment and young children, associated with concepts like friendship, imagination and fun.

The Fantanas are a group of spokesmodels who were created to promote Coca Cola's Fanta brand of soft drinks in the United States. The quartet has appeared since 2002 in advertising and personal appearances.

Germany's Biggest Business family quarrel: Adidas Vs Puma

Adidas and Puma may be among the most recognized brands in the world, but neither might exist if not for a bitter rivalry between two brothers from a little-known village in Germany. The success story of the two major sports company adidas and Puma began a very long time ago. In the 1920s, Adolf (Adi) Dassler, a soft-spoken sports fanatic who spent hours working on shoe designs in his workshop, and Rudolf Dassler, a gregarious salesman, started a small shoemaking business in the Bavarian enclave of Herzogenaurach, and their father was also a shoemaker.The two brothers Adi and Rudolf Dassler founded 1924 "Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik" and focused on sport shoes at that time.

Puma founder Rudolf Dassler as a recreational boxer in year 1929

The origins of the split between Rudolf and Adolf are hard to pinpoint, but an Allied bomb attack on Herzogenaurach in 1943 illustrated the growing tension. Adi and his wife climbed into a bomb shelter that Rudolf and his family were already in.
"The dirty bastards are back again," Adolf said, apparently referring to the Allied warplanes. Rudolf was convinced that his brother meant him and his family. The damage was never repaired.
However this is not the only version of their reasons for the separation. Some say that with the end of the war, the brother Adi had delivered to the Allies.

Adidas has its headquarters on the Herzo Base, a new town of Herzogenaurach, while Puma’s is at the northern ring road of Herzogenaurach.

Rudolf died in 1974 and Adolf in 1978. The two are buried in the cemetery of Herzogenaurach, though(of course) on opposite sides of the land.

Adidas quickly became a much larger company than its rival. Where did Puma go wrong?
One of the critical failures for Puma was that Rudolf had an argument with the coach of the German soccer team, and that allowed Adidas an opening before the 1954 World Cup, where, completely against all odds, West Germany won against Hungary … Adi Dassler was in all the [newspaper] pictures; he was everywhere. And the Adidas black boots with the stripes were on all the players. From that moment on they received letters from around the world from people wanting to sell Adidas in other countries.

Company History 5: Adobe

John Warnock and Charles Geschke, former Xerox executives, met working in the PARC (Research Center Palo Alto, Calif.). Soon they teamed up and developed a revolutionary innovation of a standard computer language and scalable-font called PostScript. When Xerox refused to market the product, both of them left the company and founded Adobe Systems in 1982. PostScript is a high-level computer language that communicates precise descriptions of computer generated graphics, photos, and text to any output device with a PostScript interpreter. Soon in 1985, Apple licensed Adobe PostScript helping to form the backbone of the revolution in publishing.
In the late 80s, after the popularisation of PostScript, Adobe released Adobe Illustrator, which soon became one of the essential software for professional graphics. The existence of these two technologies would be the basis on which created the PDF format and Adobe Acrobat.
In February 1990 came the first version of Photoshop that eventually would become one of its best-selling products.

Pdf, the paperless office?
John Warnock wanted to reduce the consumption of paper in offices, thus began an internal project to create a file format for documents that could be distributed by the company, to be on any computer, regardless of operating system.
Adobe already had two things that almost fit with the idea: The PostScript (a device-independent technology and platform used to describe documents) and Adobe Illustrator (created in 1987, a program that operated on different platforms, which could open up and show PostScript files very simple).
In 1993, Adobe engineers improved both technologies and created a new file format Pdf (Portable Document File).

History of Adidas - Adi Dassler