Among the interesting stories in Brad Stone’s just-published THE EVERYTHING STORE: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon is the chronicle of the creation of Kindle. Initiated in 2004, by the end of that year the engineers at Amazon’s Lab126 (1 = A; 26 = Z) dubbed the project Fiona. It was named after a character in Neal Stephenson’s novel THE DIAMOND AGE. It wasn’t until 2007 that Michael Cronan (who also named TiVo) came up with Kindle, “But by then [Steve Kessel’s] team was devoted to the name Fiona and the group tried, unsuccessfully, to convince Bezos to keep […]
