eMediaOne

The e-reader onslaught continues, with Chinese company ONN (or Owen, if you will) outing its latest, the E-1 e-reader. Boasting a 5-inch E Ink screen, the making it smaller than its 6-inch rivals, the Kindle and Nook. It also supports MP3, WMA and OGG formats. That’s about all the information we have on this reader for now, and we don’t know anything about pricing or release, either. We’d be surprised, albeit pleasantly, to see the E-1 released outside of China.

OWEN E1 e-reader gets outed for Chinese reading public originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 Jan 2010 01:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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1. Phil Schiller keynote live from WWDC 2009
2. Live from Apple’s ‘It’s only rock and roll’ event
3. Live from Apple’s iPhone OS 3.0 preview event
4. Live from the Macworld 2009 keynote
5. iPhone 3GS review
6. Motorola Droid review
7. Palm Pre: everything you ever wanted to know
8. Exclusive: first Google Phone / Nexus One photos, Android 2.1 on-board
9. HTC Hero review
10. Windows 7 review
11. Palm Pre review
12. Microsoft sucks at Photoshop
13. Microsoft announces availability of Windows 7 Beta and Windows Live
14. Steve Jobs is taking a leave of absence from Apple due to health reasons
15. Video: Sony’s PSP Go leaks out before E3, is obviously a go
16. Motorola Droid first hands-on
17. Windows 7 Beta goes public
18. Modern Warfare 2′s Prestige Edition includes fully functioning night vision goggles
19. Snow Leopard review
20. Live from Palm’s CES press conference

And a few other statistics for 2009 (all related to Engadget Classic):

$38,204.57 – Retail value of stuff we gave away to readers
12,681 – total number of posts for 2009
1,821 – Number of galleries on Engadget for 2009
454 – Number of hands-on posts
99 – Number of Engadget reviews
66 – number of podcasts
4 – number of Engadget shows

Engadget’s top posts, 2009 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 31 Dec 2009 23:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We know you’ve got questions, and if you’re brave enough to ask the world for answers, here’s the outlet to do so. This week’s Ask Engadget question is coming to us from Roland, who can’t wait to get his recently relocated sister some sort of phone with Skype capabilities.

“My sister recently moved to Belgium. She has access to WiFi at home, so I’d like to send her a mobile phone that can run a Skype client. Requirements are WiFi, can work on Belgian / European carriers, runs Skype, and has excellent battery life. Anyone have any suggestions?”

There’s nothing worse than not being able to communicate with someone when you desperately need to, so we’re hoping that our readers across the pond will be able to chime in here with a little advice. If you’ve got something productive to add, drop it down in comments below!

Ask Engadget: Best Skype phone for Europe? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 31 Dec 2009 23:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here’s the last action of this decade:

The FCC chairman spams his Facebook friends. Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, sent a cryptic Facebook message to all of his friends this morning, saying “Adam got me started making money with this.” It contained a broken link. Facebook suspended the account and said Genachowski will have to go through a “remediation process” and “learn security best practices” to reactivate his account.

MySpace replaces Imeem’s embedded playlists with advertising. The Imeem acquisition fiasco continues. After MySpace pulled the plug on developer access to Imeem song streams without warning, it gives users another unpleasant surprise. Ads now show up in place of embedded Imeem playlists, according to Wired. MySpace tells the magazine that they’re looking into this “asap”. Uh huh.

Google celebrates its fifth year of corporate blogging. The company’s official blog attracted north of 14 million visitors this year, with top billing going to the posts on Chrome OS, Wave and Google Voice. Twitter becomes the top non-Google referrer of traffic to the site, signaling the networks growing power in pushing traffic around the web.

Chrome OS also topped Techmeme as the biggest tech story of the year: Second place went to the death of Michael Arrington’s much anticipated tablet computer, the Crunchpad, amid legal disputes. Third went to Steve Jobs’ letter, outlining his health problems. But as we learned out later, he was not all that forthcoming, blaming a “hormone imbalance” when he actually received a liver transplant later in the year.

Wikipedia reached its fundraising goal of $7.5 million Because the online encyclopedia isn’t a commercial operation, founder Jimmy Wales asked the public for donations to sustain it. On the first day alone, 13,000 people donated $430,000.

One of the most provocative essays on Internet culture I’ve read in the last couple years is Danah Boyd’s take on viewing class divisions through social networks. She controversially argued that “white flight” was playing out on the Internet, with MySpace becoming a digital ghetto as wealthier, more educated users fled for Facebook. As an anthropologist, her work is more qualitative and based largely on interviews, experiences and anecdotes, paired with data from external research institutes like the Pew Research Center.

But now that social networks like Twitter and MySpace are opening up their public data for indexing and mashups, more hard numbers can be put toward comparing and contrasting the kinds of conversations that take place in different online communities. (That said, quantitative data can have its faults too when looking at social issues that are hard to pin down like class divisions.)

Collecta launched its own variation on MySpace real-time search this week after the News Corp.-owned social network released a brand-new set of application programming interfaces this month for publicly shared content. Obviously you’d want to look at Facebook too, but the company’s not there — yet. Facebook gave Microsoft access to its public status updates, but whatever incarnation that stream of data will assume is not yet available. Plus, up until the big privacy change this month, Facebook’s public real-time content was also limited to mainly commercial messages on Pages and updates from those who were willing to bare parts of their lives to the world.

So using real-time search, I just wanted to compare real-time conversations on both networks. It’s very unscientific. I’m basically dipping my toes into the stream, so to speak, and capturing a few updates of what’s being said now. You can try it yourself here with Twitter and here with MySpace.

Hopefully, someone out there — an academic or developer — will come up with a more rigorous way of doing this for Facebook, MySpace or Twitter through real-time search. (Or even better, for specific Twitter lists.) I’d be interested to see stats on what people talk about, the style of language, foreign languages, replies, how far content gets shared or propagated through each network.

It’s not comfortable to admit, but I do think looking at Twitter and MySpace searches underscore some of Boyd’s points about class divisions playing themselves out in online communities. Of course, Facebook has become much more mainstream than it was when she originally wrote that post in 2007. But we don’t have access to all their real-time conversations. (Facebook did its own analysis on racial composition this month using peoples’ surnames and found that the site’s user base is coming closer to mirroring the U.S. population’s makeup.)

Anyway, here are a few Twitter-vs.-Myspace searches. Let us know how you think anthropologists and sociologists should make use of real-time data.

1) “Decade” — (Because it’s the end of the decade).

Here’s Myspace –

And Twitter –

2) “New Years”

Here’s MySpace –

And here’s Twitter –

3) “Avatar” Both sites actually look pretty much the same here.

Here’s MySpace –

And here’s Twitter –

4) “2010″ Numbers bring more non-English language updates.

Here’s MySpace –

And Twitter –

5) “Google” Twitter has the leg-up here with a lot of the tech community present. There are more shared links to interesting blog posts.

6) “Lady Gaga” A single MySpace search for a music artist is actually not really all that useful. People are changing their profile songs, which doesn’t make it that interesting. But this data could be used to create all sorts of music charts.

Is there still room in your heart for eight more unassuming bits of Xmas? We hoped you’d say yes. See, 8-bit Xmas 2009 is an all-new NES cart full of festive LEDs and an original multiplayer snowball fight NES game. It sells for $43, but for $5 more you can get a personalized title screen — which seems like a relatively cheap fulfillment of that decades long dream of yours to have your name up in pixelated lights on the home console that defined the home console. The cart should be compatible with all real NES systems and hopefully many fake ones, and while it can’t help you forgive your Aunt Samantha for giving you that Sudoku quilt, it might just do the insignificant task of teaching you the true meaning of Xmas.

’8-bit Xmas’ breathes new life into your ‘Bah! Humbug!’ NES originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 31 Dec 2009 21:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It was a big year for cleantech. After a dismal start in the first quarter, things picked up, leaving it in prime position to be one of the largest areas of investment in 2010. Overall, 2009 saw 356 deals totaling $4.85 billion, according to a new report released by Greentech Media. That’s six more deals than in 2008, but almost $3 billion less. Last year was a banner year for the sector, but this is also telling that investors leaned toward more smaller deals, mitigating risk while still placing their bets.

Solar took the cake this year, taking in more than $1.4 billion across 84 deals. Biofuels came in second with $976 million across 44. But it’s not as interesting to look at the biggest and most publicized venture deals, as it is to look at the ones that may say something about future trends. So here, based on the full gamut of deals this year, is a list of the top 10 deals that seem to be prescient about the cleantech industry of tomorrow.

1. Novomer — In April, Novomer, a company that sequesters carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired plants and other sources in biodegradable plastic consumer products, brought in $14 million from OVP Venture Partners, Physic Ventures, Flagship Ventures, and DSM Venturing. Relying on an extensive collection of patents, Novomer’s technology has the opportunity to capture a vast amount of carbon that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere while cheaply making plastic products that don’t require as much petroleum. It’s basically greening two businesses at once.

As carbon capture becomes more popular, whether a cap-and-trade system is established in the U.S. or not, and emissions become too costly, companies like Novomer are prepared to reap the benefits. Most of the top-tier sequestration companies plan to bury the emissions underground, or dispose of it some other way. One company, CalStar Products, wants to funnel them into cheaper, greener bricks. But Novomer has one of the most innovative approaches in the mix. And now it has much of the money it needs to scale.

2. Silver Spring Networks — This month, Silver Spring Networks landed $100 million in equity from existing investors Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Northgate Capital and Foundation Capital, giving it the boost it needs to probably go public in 2010. The company, which makes networking equipment for utilities and smart meters, is leading the Smart Grid market as the most likely candidate for an IPO. The investment also indicates renewed investor faith in the smart metering segment of the business.

But now that almost every major utility in the U.S. has plans to roll out millions of meters to their coverage bases, firms are scrambling to get on board companies that these meters will depend on, like the networking and backend service providers. Now that Silver Spring has partnered with AT&T to use its wireless networks for data transfer, there is little standing in the way of it going public. The recent equity providers could be in for a big payday.

3. ClearEdge Power — In August, home fuel-cell maker ClearEdge, brought in $15 million in a fifth round of funding from Applied Ventures, Big Basin Ventures and the Kohlberg family. Powered by propane or natural gas, its lead product, a fuel cell a little larger than a standard refrigerator, can provide extremely clean power for households and small businesses.

Based in Hillsboro, Ore., the company’s fuel cell has a capacity of 5-kilowatts. Even though it does release carbon dioxide, it releases far fewer emissions than power plants that burn natural gas do. It recycles the heat that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere, making it 90 percent efficient. This makes it a viable source of clean energy for home where solar panels simply wouldn’t work. The only hurdle it faces to wide adoption is its price — at $37,500 after rebate, its still slightly more expensive than solar. Further investment in the company could make it price competitive.

4. Hara — This environmental footprint tracker raised $14 million in a second round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins and including Jafco Ventures and Nth power. It’s certainly impressed the right people. Kleiner brought it into the limelight last year with a $6 million first round. With so many carbon accounting companies in the mix, what makes it unique? Hara claims to track water, gas, energy and emissions for companies looking to improve their eco-profiles.

Even though things are looking bleak for the legislation that would create a carbon cap-and-trade system in the U.S., many companies are still interested in containing waste to save money and improve their public images. Just look at Wal-Mart making efforts to catalog their  products’ footprints throughout their supply chains. If any policies are passed, even on the state level, to enforce emissions reporting, companies like Hara will benefit tremendously — and it looks like its the best funded, most PR savvy one of the bunch.

5. Aquamarine Power — This deal didn’t get much attention here in the U.S. because the wave energy company is based in Scotland. Its lead product, called the Oyster, harvests wave energy and transmits it to efficient on-shore devices for easier use. It landed $16.3 million in a first round of funding earlier this year from Scottish Enterprise, Scottish and Southern Energy and Sigma Capital.

Ocean power hasn’t really caught on yet. It’s faced a bout of technical difficulties and lackluster investor interest, but Aquamarine might have figured out how to make it work, rising to the forefront of the industry. Most of its competitors have tried to derive energy from devices that float on the top of deep water. Aquamarine’s Oyster sits underwater in shallower water. This could redefine tidal power, which the Electric Power Research Institute says could provide up to 10 gigawatts to the U.S. — enough to power about 1 million homes.

6. SunRun — Also recently, home solar panel installer SunRun received $90 million in equity from Bancorp, pushing its total raised into the “serious money” category ($120 million now total). This could be enough for the company to trounce pesky competitors like Solar City, which also installs panels for a small fee in order to sell the power generated.

With SunRun leading the way, this investment could jumpstart the rooftop solar market in the U.S. Already, prices for solar equipment and materials is on the decline. And new innovations are coming out of the woodwork to make residential solar even more price competitive with traditional natural gas and coal sources of energy. If solar can become more affordable, and renewable energy policies like California’s 33 percent mandate speed things along, SunRun could become a massive business with the potential to go public.

7. Solyndra — This one is somewhat of a no-brainer. In September, Argonaut Ventures sunk a huge $198 million in capital into Solyndra, maker of cylindrical thin-film solar modules with high efficiencies at a relatively low cost. Certainly Argonaut wasn’t taking on that much risk, considering that its investment came six months after the U.S. Department of Energy infused the company with $535 million in low-interest loans via the federal stimulus package. It must have seemed like a pretty safe bet.

But the move was obviously forward-thinking on the firm’s part, as just three months later, Solyndra has filed to go public, with the odds looking incredibly good. The company is racing to get its new manufacturing facility in Fremont, Calif. up and running in order to meet demand and begin racking up revenue. But the blessing of the DOE has suddenly propelled it into the same ranks as public giant First Solar.

8. Soane Energy — Taking a step away from the industries that usually fall under the cleantech banner, Soane Energy, a company that offers technology that makes oil extraction cleaner, and more efficient, got $10 million in a first round of institutional funding from Chevron and oilfield investor Intervale this year. It plans to use the money to further refine its techniques. Eventually Soane says it will help substantially reduce waste of water, energy and heat in addition to carbon emissions.

So why is this investment prescient? A lot of people object to money being funneled into greening fossil fuels. There’s always a certain measure of pushback with a clean coal technology gets funding, or when supposedly green leaning venture firms spring to make natural gas technologies more efficient. But the fact of the matter is that fossil fuels — coal, natural gas, etc. — are still the cheapest, most prevalent forms of energy available, and will continue to be regardless of what policies are adopted or projects launched. Making them as eco-friendly as possible is going to be a multi-billion dollar business before they are fully replaced, and Soane is on the right track.

9. Tendril — In June, home energy management provider Tendril raised $30 million in a third round funding, pushing its total capital to $43.5 million. Backed by VantagePoint Venture Partners, Good Energies, Vista Ventures and RRE Ventures, the company provides a platform for regular consumers to view how much energy they are using in real time, and even how much it is costing them — encouraging them to both conserve and save on their electricity bills. This sounds pretty cool, but Tendril faces a bevy of competitors. Home energy management may just be the next cleantech bubble with players like OpenPeak, Silver Spring Networks, AlertMe, Gridpoint, EnergyHub, Control4 and more all reaching for a share of the market.

But Tendril is different. Not only does it have some of the best designed products — sleek like Apple, yet still data intensive — its stellar public relations team has given it enough momentum and brand recognition to clobber the smaller players. Its position has only been strengthened by its partnership with General Electric to interact with its appliances. Sure, Itron may be partnering with OpenPeak, and Silver Spring Networks has acquired similar service GreenBox, but neither of them have made consumer-facing home energy monitoring their core concern. Tendril has, and this focus on what regular people understand and want when it comes to their understanding of energy could make it the strongest man standing following a wave of consolidation, buyouts and the like.

Hey, good news everybody! The Palm App Catalog, which has lagged far behind its peers, has reached the 1,000 app milestone as of this morning. Well, to be precise, it’s hit 946, as pointed out by Electronista, but still, it’s a nice little sign of growth for the webOS apps, whose development was hampered by very restricted initial access to its Mojo SDK. In comparison to contenders such as Android, whose catalog numbers around 20,000, and Apples iTunes store, which boasts over 100,000, Palm’s numbers are extremely modest — but progress is progress, especially considering it launched its App Catalog in June with just 30 apps. We look forward to hearing Palm’s CES keynote, that’s for sure.

Palm App catalog hits 1,000 apps… okay, 946 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 31 Dec 2009 19:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When Daniel Raffel emailed and asked if we’d be interested in publishing his list of favorite stuff from 2009 we quickly agreed. He has worked on some of the more interesting projects in Silicon Valley over the last couple of years, and has his finger on the pulse of new technology. His post is below.

As the year winds down, I thought it would be fun to take a look back at my favorite tech launches this year. As I started assembling my list and bouncing them off friends I started to group them into the following categories: New Projects, New Products and Services, Feature Updates, and iPhone Apps. This list is an admittedly subjective batch. For instance, you’ll notice I am clearly interested in these trends: games, geo services, HTML5, identity, mobile, music, social updates, and web development. I’d love to hear what you think were exciting developments this year!

New Projects

Dive into HTML5
There are so many reasons to be excited about HTML5. Mark Pilgrim’s book illuminates many of them. When it’s finally published on paper in early 2010 it is likely going to be one of the most beautiful computer text books ever.

Music Hack Day
Get a bunch of passionate, competent technologists in a room and inspire them to hack on music projects all day, cool! While I didn’t get to personally attend the Boston event I was inspired by my friend Brian’s wrapup and Anthony’s too. Both posts contain great tips for anyone running a good, hackfest. Hope to see these events continue and look forward to attending one myself.

OAuth WRAP (Web Resource Authorization Protocol)
For a variety of situations where a developer simply wants to integrate with an API via POST the OAuth dance can a bit of a headache. OAuth WRAP is not much different than OAuth except that a client only has to pass the Access Token in the HTTP Authorization header, so it completely eliminates the need for signatures. All server-to-server WRAP calls happen via SSL. An additional benefit of eliminating signatures is that one can curl OAuth-WRAP requests without requiring any special libraries. There is an active working group fleshing out a spec and I expect to see widespread adoption of this in 2010 coming via products from the major service providers (specifically Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!).

Playdar
Started by Richard Jones, Playdar is “designed to solve one problem: given the name of a track, find me a way to listen to it right now.” While it’s definitely not ready for the general public I am very excited by the progress it has been making. And, I am looking very forward to the types of projects it is likely to enable in 2010. In the meantime, if you’re super curious checkout a few demos to see where things are starting to head.

PubSubHubbub and Simple Update Protocol
Polling feeds is no fun, it’s costly and too slow. These protocols are exciting to me because they offer novel solutions so that products depending on realtime updates can more efficiently, and quickly, aggregate update notifications.

Webfinger
Webfinger is an emerging standard that is being designed to return metadata for a given email address over HTTP. It could be used to publish metadata about an email address such as a URL to the user’s Profile, a link to a user’s Calendar, etc. This is strategically important for OpenID because it can be used to determine if an email address is OpenID-enabled and if so kick off the OpenID authentication flow.

New Products and Services

Cloudkick
With more businesses moving their infrastructure to the cloud there will be a need for new tools that help businesses manage their ops. Cloudkick provides a hosted service for managing infrastructure on multiple cloud platforms. They are already managing over a hundred thousand servers. As they build in support for more and more platforms it’s a natural assumption that they will attempt to support functionality that will allow users to migrate from service to service. As an early user I have been impressed with the teams response time to issues I have encountered. While Cloudkick isn’t ready to compete head to head with Ganglia, Nagios and other popular ops projects I’m looking forward to continuing to use the service.

Flavors.me
Technically, not launched yet, but I’ve been playing with it for a little bit. Think of it as a simple vanity site for people with either no web development chops or little interest in investing time building/hosting their own website. The default templates are very aesthetic and can be easily customized. Since there is little functionality on the site other than creating a simple, web based, business card, it’s a bit unclear how much juice they have. That said, I like how easy it is to create a public profile and share your identity with the public.

Foursquare
There’s a competitive aspect to Foursquare that makes it both satisfying and addictive. After using it for a few months earlier in the year I decided to abandon it because I didn’t see the point of using the service. A compulsive urge sucked me back in and I have to admit that it has led to some wonderful, serendipitous moments. I’ve taken a look at a few other competitors and frankly there isn’t a huge difference (for instance, Gowalla is prettier but I have far fewer friends on it, and it has terribly obnoxious Facebook integration). The LBS space is getting crowded with FSQ wannabe’s so I’m eager to see how they continue to evolve and add user value. It will also be interesting to see if any of these apps can build a sustainable business around them, at the moment FSQ seems best positioned with their Mayor deals/etc.

Google Chrome Browser
Ever since the beta launched for OS X I’ve been spending more and more time in this browser. It’s elegant and very fast. There are definitely missing features but honestly 85% of the time its current feature set suffices. If Firefox and Safari mated this would definitely be its more evolved offspring. I’ve had mixed luck with Chromium and installing extensions but then I have no business running nightly builds. In fact, I’m impressed with how hard they make it to find the link to nightlies, smart. I’m looking forward to bookmark syncing and non-buggy extension support in 2010. In the meantime, I’m happy with the beta – it’s great to see so much attention to detail, you don’t get there packing on every single feature you can think up.

GDGT
C|Net has to be a bit worried because GDGT feels like the new place where folks are talking about tech products and figuring out what they wanna buy. There are significantly more reviews, I can quickly qualify the reputation of the contributor(s), there’s a community to ping for advice and suggestions, and there are significantly more useful stats to help me make a purchasing decision. For someone interested in making informed decisions about the gadgets they buy this is a great new resource. For those who are passionate about the gadgets they already own this is a great place to evangelize and discuss hacks/etc.

Hunch
I have a tendency to enjoy making well-researched, informed decisions. So it seems natural to share what I’ve learned once I’ve invested the time and found the perfect water bottle or picked out a portable digital audio recorder. Hunch provides simple tools that make it easy to roleplay through scenarios that have already been explored by others. One might choose to think of it as a wikipedia for decisions.

Kickstarter
It’s exciting to see a platform that enables makers to raise the funding they need to do their thing. It’s also inspiring to see so many successful projects that have already launched. There are all sorts of ways to pursue the things you’re most passionate about and Kickstarter is one more toolkit in your arsenal. BTW it also feels great to fund someone with a creative idea.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii
I probably hadn’t turned on my Wii in over a year until this game came out. The gameplay is essentially a 2D scroller that’s very similar to the original Super Mario Bros for the NES. The characters have a few new moves and the levels are significantly more creative than earlier franchises in the series. I never got tired of the original game and this version feels like it has a lot to keep me coming back for more. The multiplayer version is also very entertaining.

Square
It’s hard to remember the last time I paid for something and had a delightful point of sale purchasing experience, but that’s exactly how I feel everytime I pay by credit card at Sightglass Coffee. The software that a customer interacts with at a Square vendor is just lovely. But, it’s the business plan (and hardware approach) that’s brilliant – Square is reducing the barrier for small businesses to setup a merchant account and providing inexpensive hardware that enables them to offer credit card services for next to nothing. I’m sold as a consumer and a small business owner. I’m very excited to see this running on more devices and in more types of sales environments in the near future. I also hope to see them explore premium readers with more advanced industrial designs, such as the Incase reader that Apple stores are already using.

Feature Updates

Android 2.0
While Android is still a bit too rough for me to consider ditching my iPhone (and 3rd party apps) for the 2.0 software update demonstrates that it’s quickly catching up to the iPhone OS. If you use multiple Google services the integration is all the more compelling. At this continued pace, 2010 is going to be a massive year for the Android ecosystem.

Apple iPhone OS 3.0
It’s rare to get excited again about a phone that you’ve had for years but the Apple iPhone OS 3.0 update included many great new features that brought my 1st gen iPhone back to life . It also rubbed in how much faster my new iPhone 3GS really was. The features I most appreciated were: cut/copy/paste, ability to create meetings via Exchange using ActiveSync, and wider use of landscape mode in a variety of apps. I’ll spare you the internet tethering gripe.

Apple Snow Leopard
I’m a big fan of doing less stuff better so I was very supportive of seeing Apple focus the majority of this release on under the hood performance enhancements. Their investments show too, I have a few older Macs around the house and upgrading to Snow Leopard freed up on average around 10gb of disk space, required less operating RAM during most common tasks, and caused all of my macs to feel a lot more responsive (fewer spinning wheels of death.) While there were basically no new features that got me excited the speed enhancements were well worth the minor upgrade costs.

Boxee Beta
While I haven’t logged significant time playing with the latest beta of Boxee the user interface changes are very promising. This is on my list of things to further investigate. It’s exciting to see innovation in both the 10-foot experience and internet TV space.

Facebook
Facebook launched a number of impressive new things this year, the things that stand out the most to me are: an awesome new iPhone app, the Facebook Connect for iPhone SDK, a live streaming box for 3rd party sites, the Facebook Desktop Notifications app, and what felt like a few re-designs. It’s inspiring to see a company stay true to its original objectives and still manage to innovate.

Flickr Photo People Tagging
One of the most compelling Facebook features is the ability to tag a friend in a photo, doing so creates a viral thread that triggers a lot of clickthru’s and engagement. It was safe to assume that Flickr would eventually add similar functionality and this year they did. I was pleased to discover that people tagging on Flickr was designed with additional sensitivity around a users privacy. You can explicitly define which contacts of yours can people tag you in a photo. And, Flickr explicitly spells out what happens if you remove a photo tagged with your identity (nobody else can add it back). There’s nothing wrong with borrowing a feature a competitor has but this is an excellent example of how to add your own flavor to it.

Google Voice
GrandCentral was shutdown this year and logically rebranded as Google Voice. After being ported to the Google platform and re-launched users were given a slew of awesome new features. While I’ll admit I’m still holding out for a number portability feature I’m a fan of how disruptive they are attempting to be. And, I’m a fan of numerous enhancements they’ve shipped this year alone, some of my favorite include: voicemail to text transcription (needs more tuning), free web based text messaging, the ability to change your number, and easy steps to allow you to forward your mobile voicemail to Google.

Kindle Software Update 2.3
There’s nothing like a little competition in the ebook market to cause Amazon to add basic features to the Kindle 2 that it could (and should) have supported all along. Regardless, thanks to this software update it’s nice that my Kindle 2 now natively supports PDFs.

Firefox and Webkit Support for Geolocation APIs in HTML5
It’s very satisfying to see my browser starting to have a clue regarding where I am. While very few services are actively using this functionality today the fact that browsers now support it is wonderful!

Firefox Support for the HTML5 File API
It’s unfortunate that most webservices have to use Flash to support decent file uploading experiences. Now that Javascript can read the contents of local files web developers will have the opportunity to create more refined file sharing experiences for both online and offline applications. I’m not sure if this is currently available in Webkit but beta’s of Firefox 3.6 support it.

Spotify
For the past 2 years I’ve been using Spotify as my default streaming music player and it just keeps getting better. This year I was impressed by two specific features: their massive increase in library size and their approach to the mobile experience. If you depend on the cloud for your tunes the size of the library matters. Spotify has spent the past year aggressively growing their library by tens of thousands of tracks per week. That’s much easier said than done, particularly when you’re trying to add compelling media that people actually want to listen to. I am consistently impressed when I search for something random and find they have it. While Spotify will never have absolutely everything under the sun their library consistently satisfies my very demanding appetite for both the latest releases and older classics. This year Spotify also released mobile applications that allow you to locally cache media on your phone so that you can listen to your favorite music whether or not you have a internet connection. In the year ahead I look forward to seeing how they innovate around discovery, sharing and library resolution (ie building up a list of stuff they know I already have in my local iTunes Library.)

Twitter Lists
Twitter has long had a discovery problem. Finding and surfacing what you want to follow isn’t easy. The lists feature still requires you to invest time if you want to make one but it also gives you the opportunity to track things that others have put the time into assembling (such as food carts in San Francisco or Great Chefs.) For me, the nicest part is your main feed isn’t polluted so you can casually and passively track things without adding a lot of noise.

YQL
YQL is a developer tool that treats the internet as a giant source of data. The team was on a tear this year, amongst other things they launched the execute element to enable arbitrary server-side code to run inside tables, open data tables to enable anyone to create their own API bindings for YQL, hosted storage tables to build on top of Yahoos cloud store (sherpa), and “query aliases” that let developers name their YQL queries using meaningful short names.

iPhone Apps

Dropbox
My data, backed up, and now available on my iPhone too. Brilliant.

Drop7
A very creative puzzle game that will quickly get you addicted.

Eliss
An addictive game that sets the bar very high: creative use of multitouch capabilities, beautiful graphics, innovative gameplay, and great music. Overall, an inspiring piece of work on multiple levels.

Evernote
The Evernote iPhone app got a series of major updates this year that makes it an even more useful productivity tool for note taking and backup/sync.

Orbital
I particularly enjoy games that you can drop into for a few minutes. This game has great graphics and a simple concept that turns out to be rather complex to master.

Tweetie 2
Super attractive Twitter client for the iPhone, lots of nice little touches.

Zillow
Ever checked out a new neighborhood and wondered what property there might cost? This application is extremely interesting to launch and drive/walk around with.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Whiskey Media, a company that has built websites around topics like comic books and computer games, has raised $2.5 million in funding.

The Sausalito, Calif. company was created by Shelby Bonnie, who previously co-founded online news network CNET. Whiskey Media sites are a mix of directories and online communities, and include ComicVine, AnimeVice, and GiantBomb (the topics of the first two sites should be self-evident, the third focuses on computer games).

When Bonnie launched Whiskey Media last year, he told The New York Times that he wanted to use a small staff to build popular sites: “If it is a place that people are passionate around, and you make it easy to be passionate, you find a very small group of people can make something extraordinary and make it comprehensive.

The funding was first reported on peHUB based on a regulatory filing, and the company has since confirmed the news on its blog, saying the money comes from “true family and close friends.”

And what can we expect as the subject Whiskey’s next site? Perhaps science fiction.