From iPod and BlackBerry to Twitter and Wikipedia, we take a look at the processes and people who came up with the names for these iconic tech products.

Coming up with a great technology product or service is only half the battle these days. Creating a name for said product that is at once cool but not too cool or exclusionary, marketable to both early adopters and a broader audience, and, of course, isn’t already in use and protected by various trademarks and copyright laws is difficult—to say the least.

The makers of these 10 tech products—the iPod, BlackBerry, Firefox, Twitter, Windows 7, ThinkPad, Android, Wikipedia, Mac OS X and the “Big Cats,” and Red Hat Linux—all have displayed certain amounts marketing savvy, common sense and fun-loving spirit in settling on their products’ names. Here are the intriguing, surprising and sometimes predictable accounts of their creation.

[Check out the Slideshow on CIO.com]

When times were good, the top executives from the largest U.S. banks made a mint. Below is the total compensation in 2007 for the 9 banks that received the first batch of government aid through TARP.

http://money.cnn.com/news/specials/storysupplement/ceopay/index.html

Fortune Magazine put together a list of the top 10 companies that have never laid anyone off. Great idea.

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/fortune/0901/gallery.no_layoffs.fortune/index.html

This week I’ll be heading off to Davos, Switzerland with my colleagues from Nike, Inc. for the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting. It’s no surprise that the entire meeting will be focused on the global economic crisis. All the big names from business, government and the media will spend the week asking questions on everyone’s mind: Where did we go wrong? What tough calls need to be made? How do we get out of this mess?

The answer to these questions lies in someone unexpected. There is an amazingly powerful force we can unleash to solve the world’s problems if we do the simplest thing: invest in a girl in poverty. With all this talk of the economy, it may seem odd to focus on adolescent girls, but we already spend a ridiculous amount of money and time trying to solve the world’s ills in the same old way. This financial crisis intensifies the need to invest existing resources more effectively, and a new and effective approach is right under your nose. It’s called the girl effect.

The World Economic Forum has made a powerful statement by placingirls on the Forum’s official agenda for the first time. Throughout the week — and culminating at a public session on January 31 — Nike CEO Mark Parker, Gates Foundation Co-Chair Melinda French Gates, World Bank Managing Director Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and others will urge the world to invest in girls.

You might be asking, “Why now, of all times?”

Each day I’ll be blogging from Davos to reveal how world leaders are answering that question. I’ll also share some of the buzz — people we’ve all heard of who are talking about girls — as well as those who aren’t, but should be.

Until then, here’s some food for thought:

People ask if we can afford to invest in girls right now. I say look at Kenya. Girls who go to secondary school make $2,000 more per year than girls who only attend primary school. Multiply that by 1.6 million out-of-school girls and there’s a potential $3.2 billion increase in national income. The same is true in developing countries throughout the world. So the real question is, “How can we afford not to invest?”

(These numbers are from a nifty piece of research on which Jad Chaaban of the American University of Beirut, Wendy Cunningham of the World Bank and Navtej Dhillon of Wolfensohn Center at Brookings collaborated to shed some light on what excluding girls is actually costing us — more to come on that.)

To learn more about the girl effect before Davos, check out www.girleffect.org.

[via Huffington Post] by Maria Eitel

The most sacred of American annual rites is upon us: sitting through an over-hyped football game to see cutting-edge TV ads that occasionally rival feature films for production value and creativity.

But this year it isn’t just about television — the spotlight’s online.

Some of America’s biggest brands are experimenting with viral ads, user generated ads, online remixes and web-only versions that are too-hot-for-TV.

“The broad ‘digital swing’ this year is striking,” said Tim Lefkowicz, president of Collective Intellect, an online marketing company based in Boulder, Colorado.

Some familiar faces like General Motors and FedEX have decided to punt this year, but NBC has nearly sold out its Super Bowl XLIII ad inventory at up to $3 million for a 30-second spot. It’s worth it: Viewership always reaches stratospheric levels for the game, approaching 100 million people in the U.S. alone and about a billion worldwide.

It’s a challenge and an opportunity, and every year the bar is raised. This may be the year that geeky cred plays a big part in pushing the envelope.

“In years past only smaller, more tech-savvy companies relied heavily on digital methods, in large part due to the high cost of a Super Bowl second, but also because they understood the values and habits of its core consumer better,” said Lefkowicz.

This year, brands as big as Miller, Doritos, PepsiCo and Hyundai Motors are running ads with a major online component.

Doritos is experimenting online this year with an ad consisting entirely of user generated content. “Crash the Super Bowl” had people submit their own ads and vote on the which one should appear in the official spot.

The winner gets an additional $1 million if the ad makes it to the number one spot on USA Today’s Ad Meter. The online gallery of submissions includes a man chasing a bag of chips around the floor after teasing a cat with a laser pointer, and a guy who discovers the power of “The Crunch” where a woman loses her clothes and a policeman turns into a monkey.

A great compilation of the very best Women In Tech: 2009

http://www.fastcompany.com/women-in-tech/2009

A joint venture between three movie studios has yet to land any sort of cable distribution deal for its original programming, but it will at least launch online, offering access to some 15,000 movies. But without a TV deal, the audience will be limited.

Fast Company: Greatest Gadgets of 2008

Inspired by Apple’s success in creating a mobile application marketplace, nearly every major smartphone platform now has an accompanying app store.

Seeing these stores launches has begun to resemble watching a marathon: Just when you think everyone’s crossed the finish line, you can see a few stragglers making their way to the end.

On Tuesday, Palm became the latest handset maker to launch its own marketplace to distribute mobile software from independent developers. It’s the third to do so, after Apple and Google’s Android. And it’s not the last. Application stores for BlackBerry and Microsoft phones are still waiting in the wings.

“For consumers it is a bit like being in a candy store now,” says Rana Sobhany, vice-president of marketing for Medialets, a mobile analytics firm. “They can figure out what they want and get it immediately.”

Mobile-phone software development has been around for a long time. But before the application stores made their debut, finding and installing the apps was rather complicated. The challenge for developers was to bring their apps to the attention of users, while users often had to attach data cables and download the software, explains Deepen Shah, chief technical officer for Buzzd, which is working on apps for iPhone and BlackBerry.

Even Java applications, which could be distributed through web downloads, were tough to get into users’ hands when it was difficult to get people to visit a website on their handsets.

As a result, mobile-application developers depended on hard-to-get bundling deals with carriers. If you could strike a deal with a carrier to get your software preloaded on its phones, you were in like Flynn — if not, you were out in the cold. And needless to say, with that much power, carriers could dictate their own terms.

All that changed when Apple launched its App Store, which offered a centralized discovery, distribution, download and payment platform. And it was all relatively accessible; even though Apple has to approve anything that appears in the store, the barrier is much lower than it was in the days when carrier pre-loading dominated the mobile software business. As a result, thousands of iPhone apps bloomed, and some developers have even made serious money from their iPhone apps.

But now Apple’s iPhone App Store has some serious rivals to contend with. Here’s how the four biggest app stores stack up.

iPhone App Store

The big daddy of them all, Apple’s App store is breathtaking in the simplicity of its interface and the ease with which users can search and download programs onto their phones. In the five months that the store has been live, about 13,000 apps have been added to it, says Medialets.

About 75 percent of all applications have fees. Yet free apps see 10 to 50 times higher download rates compared to those users have to pay for, says the firm. Not surprisingly many developers are releasing lite versions of their paid apps for free. Example? DigiDrummer and DigiDrummer Lite, which allows users to play drums on their iPhone.

Apps are classified into one of the 20 categories and cross-referenced against a top 50 list of free and paid apps. Where the App store scores over its rivals is not just the easy click to find and download an app, but also paying for it through iTunes.

For developers, the App store is the best bet to make some money. Apple offers 70 percent of revenues from the store to the developer of the application and keeps 30 percent.

On the downside, Apple is the gatekeeper of what gets into the store and what doesn’t — and it can take weeks to get Apple to approve an application.  Video: Jobs Unveils App Store

Wired: Can you imagine life without Super Monkey Ball, Urbanspoon and iBeer? For now, the App store is far ahead of the pack. No doubt.

Tired: All the drama around first having an NDA for developers, then getting rid of it, setting an approval process for apps and then seemingly rejecting it. The divaness of the App store would make Mariah Carey seem modest.

Android Market

It’s the anti-App Store. It’s free. There’s no approval process for developers to add their software. It’s like YouTube — just upload your software.

There’s also no revenue split with Google, which created the Android operating system, and that means developers get to keep everything they might earn from selling their apps. Unfortunately, there’s also no payment system, which means developers are on their own when it comes to trying to make some money from their apps.

It’s everything the iPhone App store is not.

However, there are very few apps: Medialets estimates that just about 500 apps are available in the Android Market.

Part of why the Android Market is so sparsely populated is that its apps currently run on just one phone: T-Mobile’s G1. And while other Android-based phones are in the works, there’s no guarantee that they will have the same features or specifications as the G1.

For developers, that means a games app that uses the G1′s accelerometer might not work on other devices that come out next year. Until more devices appear, most developers are taking a wait-and-see attitude.

For now the Market has 12 categories, though it doesn’t have list of chart toppers. Instead at the top of each app is a range, such as 10,000 to 50,000 indicating the number of times it has been downloaded.

Next year, Android hopes to have a payment system in place, potentially using Google’s Checkout service, to support paid apps. Video: Android Market

Wired: No approval process so developers can have all the fun they want.

Tired: Where are the apps? Unless you want Wrath of the Fungi or The Weather Channel as your favorite app, there’s little choice there. No Yelp, not even the popular Pandora app.

Palm Mobile Software Store

The newest kid on the block, Palm’s mobile software store launched earlier this week. Despite its clunky name, its user interface has much in common with the iPhone App store. That should not be a surprise, considering that Palm has hired a number of Apple executives over the last 18 months.

Already Palm says it has approximately 5,000 apps supporting 25 Palm devices across the company’s portfolio. Palm says about 1,000 of those apps are available for free.

Application authors who want to sell their software will get a 50-50 revenue split with Palm.

For now, users have to go online on their PCs and install the software to their Palm devices using a data cable. But with the buzz that Palm is set to debut a new Linux-based operating system named Nova, along with new handsets based on it, it is likely that newer devices from the company will come with the Mobile Software Store integrated into the phones, perhaps allowing wireless-app downloads.

Wired: Palm has a loyal developer community, and giving them a neatly packaged Software Store could be one way to re-start interest in its fading platform.

Tired: Palm needs to fix its handsets first. Palm’s Software Store can get little traction if consumers aren’t buying Palm phones in the first place.

BlackBerry Application Storefront

There are more phones out there running the BlackBerry platform — about 20 million — than Apple’s iPhone or T-Mobile’s HTC G1.

BlackBerry creator Research In Motion hopes that will lure developers who are hungry to reach a big audience. The usual suspects — Facebook, Gmail, MySpace — have all said they will offer BlackBerry apps. But the company is hoping to set its storefront apart with the availability of more productivity and business-focused software.

The Application Storefront won’t go live until March 2009. But when it does, BlackBerry hopes to cut developers a better deal than Apple. Through RIM’s partnership with Paypal, programmers will get 80 percent of the revenue from the app sales, while RIM  holds on to the rest.

Wired: RIM has promised a lot.

Tired: Where’s the store? Seriously. Even Palm has beat RIM to the finish line on this one.

[via Wired] by Priya Ganapati

After years of suing thousands of people for allegedly stealing music via the Internet, the recording industry is set to drop its legal assault as it searches for more effective ways to combat online music piracy.

The decision represents an abrupt shift of strategy for the industry, which has opened legal proceedings against about 35,000 people since 2003. Critics say the legal offensive ultimately did little to stem the tide of illegally downloaded music. And it created a public-relations disaster for the industry, whose lawsuits targeted, among others, several single mothers, a dead person and a 13-year-old girl.

Instead, the Recording Industry Association of America said it plans to try an approach that relies on the cooperation of Internet-service providers. The trade group said it has hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs under which it will send an email to the provider when it finds a provider’s customers making music available online for others to take.

Depending on the agreement, the ISP will either forward the note to customers, or alert customers that they appear to be uploading music illegally, and ask them to stop. If the customers continue the file-sharing, they will get one or two more emails, perhaps accompanied by slower service from the provider. Finally, the ISP may cut off their access altogether.

The RIAA said it has agreements in principle with some ISPs, but declined to say which ones. But ISPs, which are increasingly cutting content deals of their own with entertainment companies, may have more incentive to work with the music labels now than in previous years.

The new approach dispenses with one of the most contentious parts of the lawsuit strategy, which involved filing lawsuits requiring ISPs to disclose the identities of file sharers. Under the new strategy, the RIAA would forward its emails to the ISPs without demanding to know the customers’ identity.

Though the industry group is reserving the right to sue people who are particularly heavy file sharers, or who ignore repeated warnings, it expects its lawsuits to decline to a trickle. The group stopped filing mass lawsuits early this fall.

It isn’t clear that the new strategy will work or how effective the collaboration with the ISPs will be. “There isn’t any silver-bullet anti-piracy solution,” said Eric Garland, president of BigChampagne LLC, a piracy consulting company.

Mr. Garland said he likes the idea of a solution that works more with consumers. In the years since the RIAA began its mass legal action, “It has become abundantly clear that the carrot is far more important than the stick.” Indeed, many in the music industry felt the lawsuits had outlived their usefulness.

“I’d give them credit for stopping what they’ve already been doing because it’s been so destructive,” said Brian Toder, who represents a Minnesota mother involved in a high-profile file-sharing case. But his client isn’t off the hook. The RIAA said it plans to continue with outstanding lawsuits.

Over the summer, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo began brokering an agreement between the recording industry and the ISPs that would address both sides’ piracy concerns. “We wanted to end the litigation,” said Steven Cohen, Mr. Cuomo’s chief of staff. “It’s not helpful.”

As the RIAA worked to cut deals with individual ISPs, Mr. Cuomo’s office started working on a broader plan under which major ISPs would agree to work to prevent illegal file-sharing.

The RIAA believes the new strategy will reach more people, which itself is a deterrent. “Part of the issue with infringement is for people to be aware that their actions are not anonymous,” said Mitch Bainwol, the group’s chairman.

Mr. Bainwol said that while he thought the litigation had been effective in some regards, new methods were now available to the industry. “Over the course of five years, the marketplace has changed,” he said in an interview. Litigation, he said, was successful in raising the public’s awareness that file-sharing is illegal, but now he wants to try a strategy he thinks could prove more successful.

The RIAA says piracy would have been even worse without the lawsuits. Citing data from consulting firm NPD Group Inc., the industry says the percentage of Internet users who download music over the Internet has remained fairly constant, hovering around 19% over the past few years. However, the volume of music files shared over the Internet has grown steadily.

Meanwhile, music sales continue to fall. In 2003, the industry sold 656 million albums. In 2007, the number fell to 500 million CDs and digital albums, plus 844 million paid individual song downloads — hardly enough to make up the decline in album sales.

—Amol Sharma contributed to this article.

[via WSJ Online] by Sarah McBride and Ethan Smith