Someone complied this video to shorten the 90 minute keynote to 180 seconds. It’s a funny joke if you watched the entire thing. This article has a good rundown of what was actually announced.

via The Economist

Here are five tech related predictions for 2010. A year from now I’ll do a retrospective post and see how many of them come true. Put your own predictions in the comments.

Foursquare (geolocation) – I already wrote about this in a long post which you can read here, but I’ll say it again. Geolocation, which is the linking of mobile applications to physical real world locations is going to take off in 2010. Facebook and Google are looking to get into the game, so I wouldn’t be surprised if companies like Foursquare and Gowalla see a major pay day. If you don’t own a smartphone yet, it’s time you hop on the bandwagon.

Facebook IPO – Facebook will finally go public at some point this year, solidifying their place among the other tech giants like Microsoft and Google. In the past twelve months, the amount of Facebook users doubled to 350 million. That means Facebook is larger than every country on Earth except for China and India. Going public will also be significant because it will be Mark Zuckerberg’s proclamation to Google that the war over control of online content has escalated.

Streaming movies will overtake DVD – Netflix has stated publicly that they are literally willing to throw money at the major Hollywood studios to get them to embrace online streaming. Blockbuster pushed dvd’s to consumers, and now that they have been dethroned by Netflix, it’s time for streaming to come to the forefront. People will finally realize it’s much easier to click your remote and have a movie show up, then it is to wait three days for one to come in the mail. Bandwidth has finally reached a point where streaming HD content isn’t really a big deal.

Apple Tablet – Apple has stated they are having a major media event on January 26. All signs (mainly patents filed by companies believed to be shell companies owned by Apple) point towards the announcement of the long awaited Apple Tablet. Rumors state it might be called the iSlate, or iGuide. Regardless of the name choice, the tablet will revolutionized the publishing industry like the iTunes did for digital music sales.

The emergence of the all in one mobile device – Remember that device Leela wore on her wrist in Futurama? We’ll be a whole lot closer by the end of 2010. In the next year alone we will see pocket sized projectors coming from LG, physical payments methods created by Square, barcode scanning and more. The all in one mobile device will go hand in hand with the ever increasing accessibility of data.

Facebook was followed by Twitter, which will be followed by Foursquare. Just remember when the only thing the mainstream media can talk about is foursquare. You heard it here first, it’s going to be huge.*

What does it do?
Foursquare is a mobile location based social networking application. What does that mean? It’s an application you run on a mobile device (iPhone, Blackberry, etc.), that allows you to alert your friends of your location. At this point, a lot of people are going to ask, “why would I want people to know where I am?” To those people I say this: think back to when you first heard about Twitter. You probably asked a similar question, but trust me this is actually a good idea. First of all on Foursquare you have considerably less “friends” than on Facebook or Twitter. The people you’re giving your location to are much closer friends. You also have the option to not broadcast your location when you check-in to a new location. Most people don’t use it to tell everyone they are grocery shopping or running errands. Instead it’s used to tell people about the social places you’re hanging out. Bars, restaurants, coffee shops and other places you would want friends to meet up with you.

What makes it so appealing?
There are several gaming aspects to Foursquare that make it incredibly addictive, but at it’s core is the location based awareness. Now that most smartphones are equipped with gps, the app can determine where you are in a city. There are a ton of useful functions for this. To name a few: finding specials nearby, locating friends nearby, exploring new places, and getting local recommendations.

The gaming aspects of Foursquare are what make it really addictive. First there is a weekly leader board. You earn points by checking in at locations. You can compete with everyone in the city, or just your friends for points and to see who can top the weekly leader board. Next are the badges. By doing different things you can unlock badges which are displayed on your profile. All of the badges are designed to keep you participating with the application. Finally, you can become mayor of a location if you are the person who has visited most in the past sixty days. Some businesses have even offered perks to mayors in an attempt increase business. Here is one example.

Why it will be a huge hit
Foursquare is going to be huge because of the convergance of location awareness, gaming element and integration with other social media sites. It’s not trying to compete against Twitter or Facebook, instead it uses those platforms to have it’s users promote what they are doing and get more people involved. To truly get an understanding of how fun and addictive Foursquare can be I recommend you try it out for yourself. To get the most out of it, find a bunch of friends to try it out with. While they are constantly expanding to new cities, you’re most likely out of luck if you live in a smaller metropolitan area.

*I started writing this before I’d tried out Gowalla, which might turn out to be even better, but for basically all the same reasons. Right now Foursquare is #1, but Gowalla is quickly gaining in popularity.

Back in college we had a guy in the fraternity named Jess. I have never met someone who had more trouble waking up than this kid. He had so many alarm clocks in his room he would wake up everyone living around him on a daily basis. Apparently this guy had a similar problem. He no longer has the problem because he built a hydraulic lift to shake his bed in the morning to wake him up. The link has a video, the picture below doesn’t do this thing justice.

I shouldn’t really be surprised. Do you know the difference?

I recently ran across Prey, which is a very cool piece of software that will help you recover your laptop if it is stolen. If your laptop is stolen and connected to the internet you can have it e-mail you sensitive information that will help you track it down. My favorite feature is where you can have your webcam take pictures of the thief and send them to you.

Everyone who has ever used the internet for any extended amount of time has happened across an internet meme. Whether you knew it at the time or not, you saw it and it stayed with you for a long time.

This is a timeline of every single major internet meme ever. Not only does it show the exact date in which the meme in question appeared on the internet, it also shows how big each one became. My only complaint is that I couldn’t find any mention of Henry Earl.

Recently I signed up for Twitter at the urging of a colleague. After figuring out what it was all about, I found that I really liked it. Unfortunately it took a little nudging to get me fully understand what was going on.

This is a very short explanation of Twitter:
Think of facebook status updates, but 160 max characters and more frequent. You subscribe to friend’s tweets (the name for the updates) and in turn they subscribe to yours. You can get all of the updates through your phone, but it is turned off by default. You can send tweets (updates) from your phone or from a computer. You don’t type out every literal thing you do all day long. Instead you only put something interesting, funny or important.

Interesting – “I just missed Jared at subway today.” (true, but a story for another day)
Funny – “pandemic has shut down the office.” (everyone got obsessed with the flash game)
Important – “drinking at McCarthys.” (that way friends can meet up with you)

It helps you kill time and keep up with what your friends are doing. Wired has a great article on making tweets interesting that everyone should read, you can check it out here. At the very least I recommend trying it for a week and seeing if you like it.

Below is some sample tweets from my feed today:

hamby86 – this is creepy about 3 hours ago
vebah – rediscovering twitter… thanks for another distraction libra about 8 hours ago
stevebanfield – good to see my LA twitter contacts posting. just seeing the tweets lets me know they are ok. up here in san mateo didn’t feel a thing about 8 hours ago
stevebanfield – CNN’s update on quake http://snurl.com/378bo about 8 hours ago
cld77 – I miss my own bed about 9 hours ago

CNET is running a preview on the new Facebook design that is being tested on certain networks. Lately I have been sitting in an office for eight hours a day so I spend what some people may call an obscene amount of time on Facebook.

I’m not sure what I think about the new design. Some good things, some bad things. Mainly less clutter, which I like. The applications were getting a bit out of control and now they have been scaled back a lot. Regardless of what I think, try it out for yourself by going here.

Update: There is also an AP Article if you want to know more.