Instead, we’d have Kellogg’s C-KR1200 and General Mills’ Third-Generation CheerZero. (The futuristic-sounding Crispix might still exist). People would still devour these products as part of a balanced breakfast, but I doubt they’d understand why they had the names they had. They might not even be able to remember them.

In tech, we tolerate the names of our beloved gadgets no matter how indecipherable or convoluted. We can be happy with our laptops, digital cameras and GPS devices even if we struggle to recall them by name. I’d love to recommend my Sharp HDTV, but I couldn’t help you find the same model without consulting my purchase records. (Okay fine, it’s an LC40E77U.)

How do tech products get such wacky names? What’s the process that leads to an obscure model number or imaginary word? Come along, and we’ll explore the bizarre, confusing, and frustrating christenings of tech products famous and obscure.

The Unmemorables

Model numbers represent a sort of entropy in the tech world. Broken down, every combination of letters and numbers is simple enough. When you see “BD” as part of a product name for Sharp or LG, it’s clearly referring to a Blu-ray player. You might even guess that “DMP” stands for “Digital Media Player” in Panasonic’s naming schemes.

But over time, chaos grows as manufacturers tack on more letters and numbers to signify new variations on their products. My laptop, for instance, is an Asus UL80Vt-A1, which I think includes references to its ultra-light build (UL), low-voltage processor (V) and “Turbo33” overclocking feature. Though I’m happy with the product and can recall its name from memory, I won’t bother mentioning it to anyone else. Unfortunately, all Asus laptops, and most laptops in general, suffer from the same mind-numbing nomenclature. Even the dead-simple Eee PC netbook line comes with suffixes — 1005PE, 1201PN, to name a couple — that are easily forgotten.

Sometimes, the relationship between model numbers is also mysterious. Nikon, for example, sells an entry-level DSLR dubbed the D3000. Better and slightly more advanced cameras are called the D5000 and the D7000. But the D90 is a higher-end model, and the D3 is fancier still. Bigger is not always better.

Nikon’s D3000 touches on another common practice in tech naming: the inflated model number. Back in the earliest days of personal computing, both Apple and Radio Shack declared that their first PC was model I, and then followed it up with a II, and then a III. But as far as I know, Research in Motion has produced far fewer than 9,800 portable devices, and yet the Blackberry Torch carries this number at the end of its name. We shouldn’t be surprised, given that RIM’s very first product was a two-way pager called the 850, but I’m worried about what will happen in a year or two, when the model numbers have nowhere to go but quintuple digits. With any luck, RIM will dial the Blackberry odometer back to one or abandon the numbering scheme altogether, just in time for the company to ditch its existing operating system for QNX.

Alex Goldfayn, a technology marketing consultant who is writing a book on tech evangelism, is convinced that number soup prevents gadgets from becoming popular. An indecipherable model number hurts discussion in the press, in turn affecting how many people know about the product, thereby bringing down sales and preventing word of mouth, he said in an interview.

“If you make it impossible for people to talk about, think about and communicate about your products, you make it impossible for them to buy it,” Goldfayn said.

Trouble starts in engineering, he said, where an obsession with tech specs leads to longer model numbers because the product makers want to show off the improvements they’ve made. “The problem is, the only people who know anything about these products are the people who name them,” Goldfayn said.

I’ll let you be the judge with one more example. Samsung was kind enough to send along some notes on cracking the code to its television model numbers, which are the only way to identify specific products. Here’s how the UN55C7000 gets its name:

• “UN” stands for LED (It does?)
• “55” is the screen size
• “C” is the model year for 2010. “D” will represent televisions made in 2011.
• “7000” is the Series number, which signifies ultra-slim design, 1080p, 240Hz

Now all we need is for Best Buy to administer pop quizzes as customers exit the store.

The Unpronounceables

Even if tech manufacturers eradicated model numbers from public view, we’d still have plenty of other headaches and hangups to deal with.

A string of letters and numbers might be a mouthful, but at least you can articulate them in conversation if they’re short enough. As an alternative, sometimes product makers will saddle us with a name whose pronunciation is difficult to determine, expecting the tech press to break it down for everyone to understand.

My favorite example? Sony’s CLIÉ, which stood for “Communication, Link, Information and Entertainment” and was the name of Sony’s Palm OS-based personal digital assistants. Thanks to its mischievous accent — we’ll get more into arbitrary characters later — CLIÉ is pronounced “clee-ay,” though journalists tended to skip the accent, and I’m sure that a significant number of people assumed the product was pronounced “cly” or “clee.”

Other tech products are unpronounceable even without the help of foreign characters. When I see a mention of Intel’s Viiv, my head thinks “Viv” even though it’s supposed to rhyme with “Live.” Incidentally, that was the name of AMD’s competing home theater PC platform. And Intel knew the name was trouble when it launched it: It released a marketing deck to partners pointing out that consumers would have trouble figuring out how to say it.

More egregious examples abound when you move beyond the major brands. Tivoli Audio’s iYiYi gets mocked despite being a decent set of speakers. I understand that it’s “clearly a play on the iPod brand and the Spanish interjection “ay, ay, ay,” as some have guessed, but that doesn’t make the name any easier to look at. OQO, the ill-fated line of mini-computers by the company of the same name, is probably pronounced like “Yoko,” but the use of capital letters leaves open the possibility of a cumbersome acronym. [Editor's note: The OQO execs I met with pronounced it "O.Q.O," but I don't know if it stood for anything.]

One other fun fact: A pronounceable name in English doesn’t always translate around the world. That could explain why Google, whose name is reportedly problematic for Chinese tongues, never took hold against native competitor Baidu.

The Just Plain Eccentrics

Capitalization and punctuation trickery strikes me as the easy way out. When all else fails, give an average word some funky formatting and you’re all set.

Some products, like TiVo and Verizon’s FiOS, slipped by without too much ribbing. TiVo’s capitalization makes sense, emphasizing TV (although, apparently, the name itself is “just a fun word we made up”). But FiOS? Without a lowercase “S,” the “i” just seems arbitrary, and now the whole thing kind of looks like anticipatory mockery of Apple’s iOS, which is pronounced differently.

In less successful cases of weird punctuation, the tech press might never let it go. Consider, for instance, Sony’s insistence that the Playstation 3 be written as PLAYSTATION 3, apparently because the company got tired of telling people to write PlayStation as two conjoined words. And so we have Kotaku’s Brian Ashcraft begrudgingly capitalizing the console name until it started looking foolish.

Then, there’s the enTourage eDGe, a dual-screen e-reader with E-Ink on one side and LCD on the other. The capital “DG” stands for “Digital Generation,” a phrase that could apply to any portable computing device. As for the company name, a spokesman told me that the capitalized “T” in enTourage is “simply stylistic.” I would’ve capitalized the “U,” but that’s why I blog for a living.

Some companies go way deeper than capitalization. Along the lines of the aforementioned CLIÉ is the Cisco ūmi, a telepresence tool for televisions that makes sense when pronounced correctly (“You, Me”), but honestly, how many people are up to speed on their diacritics?

Pentax appeared to be halfway towards creating a product name when it gave us the *ist line of cameras, officially pronounced like “issed.” I get it. You’re supposed to fill in the blank for whatever kind of *ist you are. (Here’s one Pentax fan site’s really long blog post in defense of the name.)

None of these products, however, trump the Casio G’zOne, a rugged phone that combines random capitalization and arbitrary punctuation into a beautiful mess. And for bonus points, it’s tricky to pronounce. The proper way to say it, according to Nicole Lee at CNet, is letter “G,” letter “Z” and number “One,” like an ancestor of Young Jeezy. But thanks to Pizza Hut, I’ll forever associate this product with the P’Zone, an excessively greasy pizza folded over itself and baked into a loose calzone interpretation. At least that name makes sense.

He’s also being interviewed on Thursday, April 29th at 4pm ET in a live Webcast. The topic: “New Marketing in the New Normal.”

As with earlier Webcasts in this series, I’ve been invited to watch and tweet my thoughts as I do. You can do the same if you like–the Webcast interface has a built-in Twitter interface. And if you have any questions for John right now, you can leave them here as comments (or tweet them, using the hashtag #HPIO). We’ll round them up for the event.

(Further full disclosure: The Webcast is sponsored by HP and hosted at its site–hence the @HPIO hashtag. Photo of John Battelle by me, taken at last week’s Chirp conference.)

At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference this month, keynote presenter Phil Schiller explained that what had formerly been the 13″ aluminum MacBook now had what it took–FireWire 800, higher RAM capacities, and longer battery life–to be considered a MacBook Pro alongside larger-screened siblings. (The 13″ MacBook Pro also has a slot for Secure Digital cards which, unlike their Memory Stick rivals, never turned “Pro”) That leaves the entry-level white Macbook and the svelte MacBook Air as Apple’s “non-Pro” notebooks, although the MacBook Air is clearly targeted toward that user group often called “mobile professionals.” The lines are more clearly drawn between the pros and the no’s in Apple’s desktop line, where the pricey Mac Pro maintains high configurability and a high price, and the consumer line includes the LCD-based iMac and the hanger-on Mac mini.

But long before Apple renamed the PowerMacs and PowerBooks with the Pro label, the company used it on the software side. Back in 1993, Apple followed up its System 7 operating system with System 7 Pro. Quaintly touted in its press release as “the on ramp to the information superhighway,” it marked the debut of the PowerTalk messaging system, one of the company’s failed system software initiatives of the era along with OpenDoc and QuickDraw GX. On the other hand, System 7 Pro also featured two smash software hits that thrive in Mac OS toda, AppleScript and QuickTime.

Some of the Mac’s earliest applications also eventually went pro, as Apple’s Claris subsidiary churned out products such as MacDraw Pro and MacWrite Pro. But Claris was never spun out as had once been the plan, leaving its pro developers back at Apple. Even today, Apple continues to own FileMaker, Inc., the eponymous product of which is still called FileMaker Pro. (FileMaker Pro is the most basic version of the product–the more advanced one is known as FileMaker Pro Advanced.)

Microsoft has also associated databases with pros, making Access one of the applications included in Office Professional 2007, but its best-known pro product has been Windows XP Professional. XP Pro had a number of security and management enhancements beyond Windows XP Home, as well as multprocessor support, dynamic disk support, a personal Web server, and fax capabilities.

At its debut, Windows XP Professional boldly advertised its presence as a PC was starting up, but Service Pack 2 did away with that bit of vanity and all XP startup screens simply said “Windows XP”. With Windows Vista, Microsoft stopped focusing on “professional”-ism and instead gave users the business, Windows Vista Business, that is. And Windows 7 Business will arrive in the fall, where it will compete with a Mac OS X Leopard update that has added not “pro” but “snow”.

Microsoft has also developed a pro version of Windows Mobile optimized for touch-screen devices as opposed to the Windows Mobile Standard offering aimed at products such as the Motorola Q and Samsung BlackJack. But in what could be interpreted as a part of the image problem of Windows Mobile, AT&T has latched on to the “Pro” suffix to designate handsets that run Windows Mobile, period. The first example of this was with the Pantech Matrix Pro. a dual slider differentiated from the vanilla Pantech Matrix dual slider feature phone by running Windows Mobile. But the Matrix itself came after the Pantech Duo, which also ran Windows Mobile but lacked the “Pro” designation. More recently, AT&T followed up its successful Samsung Propel QWERTY vertical slider with the Propel Pro, the most “pro” phone on the market by dint of it having “pro” twice in its name. And yet, like the Matrix Pro, it doesn’t use the “pro” version of Windows Mobile.

Over at Sprint, HTC followed up on its launch with the HTC Touch, Sprint’s first touchscreen smartphone answering the iPhone, with the Touch Pro, which included a horizontal QWERTY keyboard; both phones ran Windows Mobile Professional. But how do you do the Touch Pro better? HTC added a larger screen and some spiffy call management and user interface features. The result is the Touch Pro2. Pro-”Pro” AT&T also carried the Touch Pro, but it called it the Fuze (which may be short for “con-Fuze-ing”). Now, of course, Sprint is answering the iPhone with the Pre, which we can only hope will never be followed by a Pre Pro.

In the end, “Pro” has become a tech product modifier  so dependent on context that it has become meaningless. The flames aimed at it can be fueled by only one thing: “pro”-pain.

Ross Rubin is director of industry analysis for consumer technology at market research firm The NPD Group. He maintains his own blog at Out of the Box and you can follow him on Twitter at @rossrubin. Views expressed in Technoloizer are his own.

For reasons unexplained, Baum told his story through a series of tweets, starting last Friday and concluding today (the whole thing can be read in the proper order at Baum’s Web site). Perhaps the 140-character limit is a symbol for Baum’s short career at the magazine, but I think what we’ve got here is a bona fide Twitter viral marketing campaign — intentional or not — for his latest book.

The story begins inconspicuously enough. Baum explains that he’ll be tweeting about getting fired, and immediately cuts to the juicy details. We now know how much he got paid ($90,000 per year), what benefits he received (none) and how secure the gig was (up for review annually). Later, we hear about the “creepy” atmosphere of the New Yorker office and how he butted heads with editor David Remnick.

The narrative is also sprinkled with self promotion. At every mention of an article or pitch, accepted or rejected, Baum includes a link, so it’s easy to investigate his writing beyond the boundaries of Twitter.

Baum delivers the subtle pitch towards the story’s conclusion. He talks about how the end of his New Yorker job led to his book, Nine Lives, a collection of stories about New Orleans. He mentions how his final columns allowed him to stay in New Orleans and research the book, and how the pressure of finding daily stories turned up valuable information that few locals even knew. Even though he doesn’t explicitly try to sell the book, he succeeded in getting the word out.

Viral marketing can take different forms, and Twitter marketers can be obnoxious. Baum is not. He drew in fellow Twitterers with a fascinating story, and only mentioned the book when he had everybody’s attention. In a way, it reminds me of the ilovebees campaign for Halo 2, which drummed up interest despite a merely tangential relation to the game.

At the very least, Baum’s story was better than the hostile takeover by Skittles.

Unlike GM’s famous backfire with its Chevy Tahoe user-generated commercial contest, the Skittles stunt, I suspect, was never about getting people to talk earnestly about the features and benefits of the product in question. I suspect that Mars knew that much of the chatter would be self-referential, strange, and obnoxious. The goal was to co-opt Twitter, period, even if it led to people theorizing that Skittles might be made in Chinese sweatshops from the blood of kittens. Call it social-media marketing nihilism.

(Actually, come to think of it, is it even possible to say positive things about Skittles beyond expressing a fondness for their taste? The damn things just don’t have much in the way of personality beyond being colorful, sweet, and vaguely fruit-flavored–by comparison, Peanut M&Ms or Three Musketeers are deep, profoundly Proustian foodstuffs. Which might be why Mars went the direction it did with this party trick: It’s hard to imagine many people talking about Skittles otherwise.)

I’m reminded of Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice campaign from January, which had the fast-food giant doling out free hamburgers to people who unfriended compatriots on Facebook. It got people talking about Burger King for sure, but it also involved gaming somebody else’s world to promote junk food. Some people called Facebook clueless  when it quashed Burger King, but I kind of got the point.

I like Twitter. I like the fact that it’s an open, rambunctious, and honest reflection of what millions of people feel like talking about on any given day–so call me a humorless old fogy if you will, but today’s explosion of manufactured interest (aka unpaid product placement) for Skittles kind of ticks me off. I assume it’ll be brief, but I’d shed no tears if Mars came to regret the whole idea. Somehow, though, I think it would only do so if the campaign led to a sharp decline in Skittles sales–and maybe not even then. I’m guessing that other marketers will eyeball today’s prank jealously, and try to top it with even more over-the-top, obnoxious takeovers of social-media sites.

Me, I’ve bought no Skittles in this decade–actually, I don’t recall buying any in the 1990s, either–so a personal boycott wouldn’t have any effect on sales. The best I can do to protest is to buy and consume the fruit-flavored wares of a Skittles rival manufactured by someone other than Mars. Say, Jujubes. No–Chuckles. Definitely Chuckles.

Random side note as long as I’m talking about empty calories and social media: Slim Jim has its own social network that has very little to do with processed meat snacks, but does try to associate its product with having “absolutely no regard for proper conduct or state laws of any kind.” It also makes a funny about shaving the neighbor’s cat. Again, call me a boring old person if you will, but I’d love to hear Slim Jim manufacturer ConAgra reconcile this stuff with the blathering it does about corporate values and responsibility.

You gotta wonder how the company would feel about Slim Jim fans vandalizing its headquarters–a violation of both proper confuct and, I’d imagine, state law–and then impishly blaming it on their “spicy side.” And if ConAgra CEO Gary Rodkin has any pets, I hope he keeps them inside.

But I’ll say this for Slim Jim’s experiment in marketing through social networking: Unlike Skittles, it created its own playground rather than taking over someone else’s…