FYI: Computers and the internet have made us all familiar with brands such as Amazon, eBay and Hotmail, but where did their names come from?

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos felt the magic was missing from the name Cadabra.com, so decided to rename his company after the world's most voluminous river. He saw the potential for a larger volume of sales in an online bookstore than from the regular variety and wanted to reflect his - well-founded, as it turned out - optimism. It has also been suggested that Bezos chose a name beginning with 'A' to cash in on the popularity of Yahoo, which listed entries alphabetically at the time.

Apple Computer was named after the favourite fruit of co-founder Steve Jobs, who had at one time worked in an apple orchard. In 1976, he was late in filing a name for the business and he threatened to call the company Apple if his colleagues didn't suggest a better name by a 5pm deadline. No better suggestion was forthcoming. Apple also wanted to distance itself from the cold, complicated imagery created by other computer companies at the time, which had names such as IBM, NEC and Integral Systems. To continue the theme, the firm's Macintosh machine is named after a variety of apple popular in the United States. Apple was sued by the Beatles' record label, Apple Corp, in the early 1980s. As a result, the firm had to pay to use the name Apple and agreed to refrain from offering music products, a promise that is now being tested by Apple's iTunes Music Store.

eBay.com began life as Auctionweb in San Jose, California, in September 1995. Founded by Pierre Omidyar and Jeff Skoll, its first sale was of Omidyar's laser pointer for US$14.83, despite it being clearly marked as broken. The firm changed its name to eBay in September 1997. Originally, the site belonged to Echo Bay (which refers to nowhere in particular; Omidyar thought 'it sounded cool') Technology, Omidyar's consulting firm. Omidyar tried to register the domain name EchoBay.com but found it had already been taken by Echo Bay Mines, a gold mining firm, so he shortened it to eBay.com.

Hotmail co-founder Jack Smith had the idea of accessing e-mail via the internet from anywhere in the world. Business partner Sabeer Bhatia tried out many names ending in 'mail' and settled for Hotmail as it included the letters 'HTML' - the language used to write web pages. The firm was initially named case sensitive HoTMaiL.

Oracle, the database management firm, was founded by Larry Ellison, Ed Oates and Bob Miner, who had previously worked on a consulting project for the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The code-name for the project was Oracle (the CIA was looking for answers to everything). The CIA terminated the project but the trio decided to bring Oracle to the world, nonetheless.

Yahoo started life as 'Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web' but eventually received a new name with some help from the world of literature. Founders David Filo and Jerry Yang say they chose the moniker because they liked the word's definition, as used in the book Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: 'rude, unsophisticated, uncouth.'