Looking back, looking forward: 2009-2010 – The Monday Jan 4th Roundup

A different kind of roundup for the first week of 2010. This week we’ve put together a “roundup of roundups” so to say, a selection of stories on what the tech world thought was important about 2009, as well as the important trends of 2010. We’ve got the top techs of 2009, trends emerging as we head towards 2010, and even a little bit on 2020 and beyond.

Looking Back

2000 continued the 90’s trend of increasing copyright protections and expanding copyright terms. In response to this trend Duke university has posted a list of what would have been public domain on Jan 1st if not for expanded copyright terms.
With the campaigns of Barak Obama and Ron Paul 2000 became the decade that pushed online marketing into the political mainstream. Clickz sums up their favourite uses of technology in politics.
Arstechnica says that we’ve used 1,370 million IPv4 and only have 722 million left. Could we be seeing IPv5 soon?
The Digital Divide. There is a term I haven’t heard since university. However, it has continued to grow whether or not we’re thinking about it.

Looking forward

What’s going to happen in 2010? Geoff Ramsey, CEO of eMarketer, lays out his predictions for online marketing in 2010. Its a tad controversial with statements like “the entire multi-billion–dollar media industry has been puffed up beyond its true value because of waste” but I have a hard time disagreeing with anything he says.
The iPhone made the biggest splash of 2000 in the phone world, and now everyone is trying to get a piece of the smartphone market, including Google. Engadget has recently scored an exclusive look at the Google Nexus One which, thanks to some recent Google buys, is looking like it could be a game changer of its own.
Adage rounds up its favourite technology from CES claims that it will be big in the following year. 3d TV’s? Really? Whatever you say.
Gotta have at least one rant, right? BBC’s Mike Ward claims that technology is going to ‘outstrip’ netbooks. He cites blog Pocket Lint, arguing that the introduction of windows XP/7 netbooks has driven the requirements so high that their cost has outstripped the notion of them being low cost alternatives. This is true to a point, there are a lot of new netbooks and featherweight laptops coming out at high prices, but at the same time there is still a plethora of low cost alternatives (such as my $200 HP Mini). What has happened isn’t that netbooks have outpaced themselves, its that the market has expanded to include the borderline models that sit between netbook and laptop.To further this Mr. Ward decides to talk to man-of-many-first-names Ian Drew of ARM. ARM has long held a strong place (oh the puns) in the mobile world due to its low cost low power CPU’s, but has had less success in the more competitive on-the-go computing world. Hence why there should be no surprise that he thinks that netbooks will move to Linux and ARM processors. Sure Ian. Oh, and lets not forget the laughable claim that people are going to have “personalized” micro gadgets that “are tuned to specific purposes” (surely not like the TwitterPeek). He defends this with the example of the phone, and how the phone has changed a lot in the last 3 years, while your PC has remained the same. Yes Ian, the phone has become more like a PC by extending itself beyond it’s “specific purposes” and become a more general use device. Congrats on disproving your own point.
Then just to further the hilarity of this piece they interview SonyEriccson on the future of netbooks. Can you predict their prediction? Yeah, Ssmartphones will take over netbooks. Surprise!
2010 will be interesting, but Networkworld is looking to 2020 and beyond, explaining how technologies such as GENI, The Floating Cloud, and Social Networking are going to change the way the web works.