The Nokia company was originally started in Finland in 1865 as a paper pulp manufacturing company.

 

Nokia was founded in 1865 by Finnish mining engineer Fredrik Idestam as a paper mill in Finland. Idestam established the first mill near Tampere, Finland, and a second mill near Nokia in 1868. The name Nokia comes from the location of the second mill, which was built on the banks of the Nokianvirta River. In 1871, Idestam and his friend Leo Mechelin formed a company called Nokia Ab.

Nokia expanded into other industries over the years, including electricity generation, manufacturing telephones, and selling toilet paper and car tires. In 1967, the three companies (paper, rubber, and cables) merged to form the Nokia Corporation. Since the 1990s, Nokia has focused on the telecommunication industry.

In 1998 Google offered to sell its search engine to Yahoo for $1 million but Yahoo refused the Offer.

In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, approached Yahoo to sell Google for $1 million ($1.5 million today). Yahoo refused the offer. That was a big mistake. But is that it? 

In 2002, Google was much more valuable. Now, Yahoo CEO, Terry Semel must have realized the true potential of Google. Yahoo approached Larry and Sergey to buy Google. Yahoo wanted to buy it for $3 billion ($4.32 billion today), but Google wanted $5 billion ($7.2 billion today). Yahoo refused the offer again. This was a huge mistake. On January 16, 2020, Google’s parent, Alphabet, became the fourth biggest tech company to be worth $1 trillion. They never got a chance to buy Google again.

YouTube was originally designed as a video-based dating website

 

Yes, YouTube was originally designed as a video-based dating website. The site was founded on February 14, 2005, and the slogan was “Tune in, Hook up”. The idea was that users would upload videos of themselves talking about what they were looking for in a partner.

The founders were unsure which direction they wanted to go, but since they registered the domain name on Valentine's Day, they gave the website the tagline of “Tune In Hook Up”.

YouTube failed as a dating site. A year later, the platform was receiving 25 million views and seeing 20,000 uploads every day. Within a month, the site was welcoming over 30,000 viewers a day.

Today, YouTube is the second-largest search engine.