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]

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

Take a visual look into how Boomers, Gen-X, and Gen-Y communicate – and how.

Boomers had it pretty simple back in their youth. Want to connect with your friends? Write them a letter, give them a call or go and see them.

Gen X-ers had a little more fun. They could’ve emailed each other over 28.8 or used their pagers to send 1-sentence messages back and forth.

Here’s what Generation Y uses to stay in touch.

To an outsider, it can be a confusing to understand how Gen Y uses those channels just to talk to each other. After all, Boomers just had three channels and they made friends just fine.

To put things in context, here’s what my communication habits are like and how I use the above.

Looking at that chart makes me envy my father’s generation. They didn’t have to worry about drunk texts. Or having personal information all over the internet.

Honourable mentions for Blackberry PINs and Twitter.

[via TheMarketingStudent] by David Fallarme