SixTimesEight

Electronic Bigass Auction Yard?

March 12, 2006 – 5:39 pm

For quite a long time now I have wondered exactly what the hell ‘eBay’ was supposed to mean. Unfortunately, this has tended to pop into my head when I wasn’t near a computer to look it up. Today was different though. I finally looked it up. Here is what I found on wikipedia:

“Pierre Omidyar, who had created the Auction Web trading website, had formed a web consulting concern called Echo Bay Technology Group. “Echo Bay” didn’t refer to the town in Nevada, the nature area close to Lake Mead, or any real place. “It just sounded cool,” Omidyar reportedly said. When he tried to register EchoBay.com, though, he found that Echo Bay Mines, a gold mining company, had gotten it first. So, Omidyar registered what (at the time) he thought was the second best name: eBay.com.”

So it isn’t Electronic Bigass Auction Yard after all. I was convinced I had it pegged too.