Origin of companies- Bed bath and Beyond

Remember the film "Click" where adam sandler plays the lead role? then you must remember the store "bed bath and beyond" where he goes to and has a sweet nap(and thats where the entire story takes place, though not literally.. )

Being an Indian, i was surprised to find that BB&B is a company that features in the Nasdaq100.
lets look at the history of that company now.

BB&B was founded by Leonard Feinstein and Warren Eisenberg. Both men possessed over a decade of retail experience in 1971 when they formed Bed 'n Bath, a small chain of specialty linen and bath shops in suburban New York. As employees in management positions at Arlan's, a discount chain that fell on hard times during the early 1970s, the two sensed an essential change in retailing trends. "We had witnessed the department store shakeout, and knew that specialty stores were going to be the next wave of retailing," Feinstein told Chain Store Executive in 1993. "It was the beginning of the designer approach to linens and housewares and we saw a real window of opportunity." Bed 'n Bath's first two 2,000-square-foot stores were located in high-traffic strip malls and carried such brand-names as Cannon, Wamsutta, and Fieldcrest, as well as a line of lower&ndash′iced linens and bath towels.

During the 1970s Bed 'n Bath expanded at a healthy but unremarkable pace, and by 1985 the chain had grown to 17 stores located in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and California. During this time, however, a number of similar bath and bed specialty shops had opened. What had begun as a niche market was growing increasingly competitive as retailers sensed a "cocooning trend" among baby boomers. Specialty chains such as Linens 'n Things, Pacific Linens, and Luxury Linens sprang up to tap into this new market. Feinstein and Eisenberg opened their first superstore in 1985 in an effort to set themselves apart from the sudden wave of competition that had appeared.

The new superstore was revolutionary in a number of ways. Over ten times the size of Bed 'n Bath's original shop, this 20,000-square-foot outlet offered a comprehensive line of home furnishings in addition to Bed 'n Bath's traditional linens and bath products. While most department stores and specialty shops offered only a few select brands, Bed 'n Bath's superstore offered seemingly every possible color, style, and size of each product. Until this time, most independent home textile retailers either copied department store merchandising techniques or followed the mundane merchandising style used by discount retailers. Eisenberg and Feinstein did neither. Bed 'n Bath, along with chains such as Toys "R" Us and Blockbuster Video, became pioneering "category killers": large specialty retail outlets that beat their competition by offering virtually every possible product in their specific category at everyday low prices. Other than semi-annual clearances to reduce inventory, the company never held sales. They claimed that their prices were already lower than other stores' sale prices.

In 1987 Eisenberg and Feinstein changed the name of their organization to Bed Bath & Beyond in order to more accurately reflect their superstore format. By 1991 Bed Bath & Beyond had opened seven new superstores in New Jersey, California, Virginia, Illinois, Maryland, and Florida, and expanded two existing stores into the superstore format. Sales reached $134 million that year, generating earnings of $10.4 million. Eisenberg and Feinstein funneled the revenue back into the company.

The company's success was considered unusual for the home products industry. As one analyst said, Bed Bath & Beyond "took a less than strong category and made it important." It did so by making ordinary household products seem exciting, even romantic. Customer service was an essential part of this marketing strategy. The company strove to build word-of-mouth advertising through a unique combination of family atmosphere and attentive customer service. Both management and sales personnel worked the floor, arranging merchandise displays, helping shoppers carry products, and otherwise making themselves useful. According to Fortune, even Feinstein and Eisenberg would gather on the floor on Saturday, to "tidy merchandise and ... pick up bits of litter." Check-out waiting time was reduced by increasing the number of cash registers, and the company developed a policy wherein, if the store was out of a desired product, Bed Bath & Beyond would deliver it to the customer's home, free of charge. Due to this strategy, Bed Bath & Beyond was able to keep paid advertising to a minimum. The company often saturated the market with advertising when a new store opened, then successfully relied on word-of-mouth to keep customers coming in.

Origin of companies- Baidu

Baidu.com, is the first chinese company that has made it to the Nasdaq 100. here's the origin of their name



"Many people have asked about the meaning of our name. 'Baidu' was inspired by a poem written more than 800 years ago during the Song Dynasty. The poem compares the search for a retreating beauty amid chaotic glamour with the search for one's dream while confronted by life's many obstacles. '...hundreds and thousands of times, for her I searched in chaos, suddenly, I turned by chance, to where the lights were waning, and there she stood.' Baidu, whose literal meaning is hundreds of times, represents persistent search for the ideal."

Origin Of Companies - Amazon

When you are in doubt and you dunno how to decide, then use "Regret Minimization Framework".
How does it work? think that you are 80. now ask yourself, if you , at 80 would regret not having chosen to undertake a venture? if the answer is yes , then minimize the regret and go ahead. this was exactly how JeFf bezos decided to start Amazon.com..
Named after the largest river(not longest), it was previously called Cadabra.com but it was soon dropped cos it sounded close to cadaver(meaning corpse). A company folklore says that the founder(jeff) wrote the business plan while he and his wife drove from Fort Worth, Texas to Bellevue, Washington, but this is largely denied by early employees
The first book Amazon.com sold was Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought

The Business plan funda
Amazon's initial business plan was unusual: the company did not expect a profit for four to five years; the strategy was effective. Amazon grew steadily in the late 1990s while other Internet companies grew blindingly fast. Amazon's "slow" growth provoked stockholder complaints: that the company was not reaching profitability fast enough. When the dot-com bubble burst, and many e-companies went out of business, Amazon persevered, and, finally, turned its first profit in the fourth quarter of 2002: U.S. $5 million, just 1¢ a share, on revenues of more than U.S. $1 billion, but the profit was symbolically important.

The amazon umbrella.
lots of companies come under the amazon umbrella, namely,
IMDb

PlanetAll

Alexa Internet

mobipocket.com,
junglee,
joyo.com
and few other companies

origin of companies - adobe

This is in keeping with my promise of writing about the origin of companies along with a few other trivia.. here's the second of the series. the first u'd remember was the post about RIM research in motion..
Adobe- origins

the company was founded when charles geschke and john warnock left Xerox Parc to develop and sell Postscript page description language. the name of the company Adobe was named after the creek that ran behind the house of one of the company's founders..
a picture of the creek (useful for quiz purposes)

origin of companies - Akamai

when u log into ur mail, if u check the status bar of ur browser, u can find this word appearing and disappearing.. akamai.. Akamai is basically a hawaiian word meaning smart or intelligent.

The origin of Akamai..

Akamai's beginnings lie in a challenge posed by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in early 1995. The father of the Web foresaw the congestion that is now very familiar to Internet users, and he challenged colleagues at MIT to invent a fundamentally new and better way to deliver Internet content. What he probably didn't expect was that posing such an academic problem would ultimately result in a service that is revolutionizing the Internet.

MIT Professor of Applied Mathematics Tom Leighton, who had an office down the hall from Dr. Berners-Lee, was intrigued by the challenge. Dr. Leighton, a renowned expert on parallel algorithms and architecture, has served as head of the Algorithms Group at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science since its inception in 1996. Dr. Leighton recognized that a solution to Web congestion could be found in applied mathematics and algorithms. He solicited the help of graduate student Danny Lewin, and several other top researchers, to tackle the problem.

Dr. Leighton and Mr. Lewin were joined by other scientists with expertise in computer science and data networking to develop the mathematical algorithms necessary to handle the dynamic routing of content and solve what was, by then, a frustrating problem for Internet users.

Building a Business
These world-class scientists developed a set of breakthrough algorithms for intelligently routing and replicating content over a large network of distributed servers — without relying on centralized servers typically used by Web site owners today. Jonathan Seelig, then enrolled in the MIT Sloan M.B.A. program, joined the founding team, and they began building the business plan that would lead to Akamai's inception.

In 1998, the group entered the esteemed annual MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition, where the company's business proposition was selected as one of six finalists among 100 entries. The distinction signaled that Internet content delivery had serious market potential. Akamai obtained an exclusive license to certain intellectual property from MIT, and development efforts began in the fall of 1998.

In late 1998 and early 1999, a group of experienced Internet business professionals began to join this founding team. Most notably, Paul Sagan who was a former President of Time Inc. New Media, a founder of Road Runner cable modem service and who helped launch NY 1 News, became chief operating officer and eventually president of Akamai Technologies. George Conrades, former chairman and chief executive officer of BBN Corp. and senior vice president of U.S. Operations for IBM, assumed the helm as chief executive officer a few months later.

Launching Commercial Service
Together, these computer scientists and experienced Internet professionals founded Akamai, a company dedicated to ending the "World Wide Wait" through intelligent Internet content delivery. The company launched commercial service in April 1999 and announced that one of the world's most trafficked Web properties, Yahoo!, was a charter customer