The question of what Ebay stood for came up in conversation. So I asked my
friends over
at Urban Legends. This is the answer I received~~~
___________________________________________________
. Here's an excerpt from "The Perfect Store: Inside eBay" by
Adam Cohen
"The name [Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay] chose was as utilitarian as the
site itself: AuctionWeb.
Since AuctionWeb was only a hobby, and he intended to offer its services for
free,
Omidyar tried to keep costs low. He wrote the program by patching together
freeware
he found on the Internet, and he ran the site from his home, off of a
$30-a-month
account he already had with Best, his Internet service provider. Rather than
create
a new website, he added AuctionWeb to one he was already operating. That spring,
Omidyar had formed a sole proprietorship for his web consulting and freelance
technology
work, which he had named Echo Bay Technology Group. The name was not a reference
to Echo Bay, Nevada, the wilderness area near Lake Mead, or to any other
real-world
Echo Bay. "It just sounded cool," he says. When he tried to register
EchoBay.com,
however, he found he was a few months too late. Echo Bay Mines, a Canadian
company
that mined for gold in Nevada, had gotten to it first, and was using echobay.com
for its corporate home page. Omidyar registered what he considered to be the
next
best thing: eBay.com."
AuctionWeb was actually part of eBay.com, like www.ebay.com/auctionweb, then
somewhere
along the way he dropped the AuctionWeb name and stuck with just plain eBay.
~ Mark "going once, going twice, sold!" Raftogianis
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