Digital vocabulary is rife with brand names, as befits a space in which every single action means using several services devised by other people. The most famous have become everyday words in their own right—“Googling,” together with the increasingly common verb “to Facebook”—while even those that haven’t taken on this kind of familiarity still constitute some of the world’s most internationally recognized words.
Companies creating digital services can often seem as weightlessly abstracted as their products themselves: indeed, there are few human creations that more effectively alienate us from the circumstances of their production than online tools or the machines we use to access them. Dig beneath the surface of many of these names, and you’ll find particular geographies and histories waiting to be uncovered.
As well as being the name of a vast communications corporation, for example, Nokia is also the name of the small town in southwest Finland, where that company’s second pulp mill was built in 1868 three years after its founding (in 2008 the company’s last operations in the town were moved away farther south). Similarly—albeit more recently—American software giant Adobe Systems was named after the Adobe Creek, which ran near the house of its cofounder, John Warnock, in California.
The names of people and places run throughout the world of digital brands, often referring to still-living people, given the industry’s youth. The open-source operating system Linux, initially released in 1991, takes its name from the first name of its creator, Linus Torvalds, who at the time was a student in Helsinki. Torvalds thought using his own name for the software was egotistical; but his coworker Ari Lemmke felt that Torvalds’s proposed name, Freax, was less memorable and took matters into his own hands.115
Digital names don’t always have any link to local geography, of course, a case in point being the online retailing giant Amazon. Its founder, Jeff Bezos, was looking for a name that both came near the start of the dictionary and that embodied something he hoped would become the biggest of its kind. The Amazon River met both these needs, having the greatest flow of any river system—a perfect metaphor for Bezos’s desire to see all the world’s online commerce flow through his site.
Finally, some geographies are buried deeper than others within famous names. In 1995, an online auction house website called AuctionWeb was founded in California by programmer Pierre Omidyar. Two years later, Omidyar changed the company’s name and web address, originally aiming to bring it in line with his consulting company, Echo Bay Technology Group. But his first choice of domain name, echobay.com, was already being used by a Californian mining company working in Echo Bay, Nevada. Omidyar thus went with his second choice, ebay.com—and the rest is history.116