The Technologizer Year in Review

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It’s been Google’s wont for a number of years to publish a year-end wrap-up reflecting what people searched searched for. It calls this report Google Zeitgeist, and several other sites  produce counterparts, such as YouTube Rewind and the Yahoo Year in Review.

If the big guys can do this, why not Technologizer? Here’s a recap of 2010–what you folks were reading and searching for, which sites sent you here, which browsers and operating systems you used, and where in the world you came from.

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Coming Next Week: CES Coverage, Ballmer Liveblog

For tech journalists, there’s no such thing as a new year’s holiday. We’re all too busy getting ready for next week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The show floor doesn’t open until Thursday, but the festivities get rolling on Tuesday–and on Wednesday evening, Steve Ballmer will give Microsoft’s traditional keynote address. At last year’s event, he announced iPad-esque “Slate PCs” that went pretty much nowhere; this year, he’s expected to talk about another iteration of the concept and maybe even provide an early look at Windows 8.

I’ll be covering the show all week, and will liveblog the Ballmer keynote as it happens. You can join me at www.technologizer.com/ces2011–and if you head there right now, you can even sign up to get a reminder by e-mail.

Technologizer’s Prize Extravaganza: The Winners

We’ve done our random drawing and found winners for the cool prizes we offered to induce you to tell us about your favorite products of 2010. Here are the folks who’ll be getting goodies.

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A Technologizer Prize Extravaganza

Say, want to win a cool prize? Here are eleven chances to do just that. We’d like members of the Technologizer community to nominate the best tech products and services of 2010. If you participate, you’ll get a shot at winning one of the following prizes.

Kobo Wireless eReader. Courtesy of Kobo, a Wi-Fi enabled e-reader with a 6″ E Ink screen.

Zune HD. Courtesy of Microsoft, two 32GB touchscreen media players with color OLED screens and one month’s access to the Zune Pass service apiece.

Ooma Telo. Courtesy of Ooma, its VoIP phone system, which lets you make U.S. calls for free.

Roxio Creator 2011 and Tron Premiere tickets. Courtesy of Roxio, its Windows creativity suite for editing, managing, and burning videos and photos (including 3D ones), music, and more–plus two tickets to see Tron Legacy (premiering December 17th) at an AMC theater.

eBooks. Courtesy of Kobo, electronic versions of five books about technology (picked by me) which are readable on Kobo’s ereader, PCs, Macs, iPhones, iPads, Android handsets, BlackBerries, and other devices:

• The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick
• Googled by Ken Auletta
• iWoz by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith
• Say Everything by Scott Rosenberg
• Twitterville by Shel Israel

You have until Monday, December 13th at 5pm PT to enter; we’ll draw eleven names from among those who entered at random and award each lucky person one of the prizes above.

Click here to name your favorite products (which will take no more than a few minutes) and enter the drawing. Good luck, and thanks!

Me on Bloggingheads.tv

I had fun recording a Bloggingheads.tv diavlog with Slate’s technology scribe Farhad Manjoo about the year in tech (and what 2011 may bring). Here we are chatting…

Microsoft. Mojo. Discuss!

My weekly Technologizer column for TIME.com is about Microsoft, and whether it can regain the mojo it had back when the tech universe unquestionably revolved around the PC. The jury is still very much out. But between Windows 7, Windows Phone 7, Bing, and Internet Explorer 9, the company is less the sleeping giant it was a few years ago, and more of a giant running at a decent clip–for a giant, I mean–and in the right general direction, at least.

Of course, I could have written another seven hundred words on stuff Microsoft apparently hasn’t figured out yet. It hasn’t articulated a plausible strategy for tablets, for instance–by which I mean that “Windows 7 is the best tablet operating system” just isn’t going to cut it. (In this case, I suspect there’s a very strong chance that the company is closer to having its act together than its public statements would suggest, and just doesn’t want to say much until it has more to show.) I also think that the company is still struggling with the whole concept of low-cost browser-based Office suites; it doesn’t want to be the company that proves it’s possible to build one so good that traditional desktop-based Office looks unnecessary.

Anyhow, here’s a silly little poll. Please take it and share further thoughts in the comments…

Last Chance to Tell Tech Tales and Win a Big Prize

Here’s one more reminder about this contest–the deadline to enter is this Sunday, October 31st.

A while back I contributed a guest post about the oldest tech product I still use–a 16-year-old pair of Bose speakers–to a site (sponsored by HP) about unexpectedly bountiful returns on investment. Now the site is holding a sweepstakes that invites you to share your own tales of purchases that paid off in ways you didn’t expect. The grand prize is pretty spectacular: a trip for six to the Napa Valley, including flights, accommodations, spa sessions, a wine-country tour, and a balloon ride–and an assortment of HP products for your office.

You can get a shot at these and other prizes by entering here, and the top stories will be shared on the site.

The Appliance Age of Computing

My weekly Technologizer column for TIME.com this up. I wrote about the overarching message of last week’s Apple event–which, between the almost entirely solid-state MacBook Airs, the iPad-like new version of OS X, and the Mac App Store, is that Apple is trying to reinvent the Mac into something that looks a little less like a personal computer and a little more like an appliance.

Is that good news or bad? As with most change, it combines both upside and downside, and it’s Apple’s responsibility to pull it off in a way that works for its customers. (I like the first tangible results, the surprisingly iPad-like new Air, and will be writing more about it.)

Every Kind of Reality But Real Reality

Last week, our Los Angeles correspondent Jared Newman dropped in on the first Immersive Tech Summit, a conference about virtual reality, augmented reality, and other attempts to make the virtual world a little more realistic–or, sometimes, the real world a little more virtual. He took pictures as he explored the show, and has put together a gallery of some of the exhibits he visited. (My favorite, even though I don’t quite understand it, is the fellow at right, who goes by the name Punch Bob.)

View Scenes from the 2010 Immersive Tech Summit slideshow

Technologizer, Now in Convenient Wood-Pulp Form

If you pick up the issue of TIME magazine that came out today–it’s cover dated November 1st, with the cover story “How to Restore the American Dream”–you’ll find a name you may know on page 75: mine. Actually, two familiar names, since it’s my byline appearing on Technologizer’s first appearance in print. (The article is an updated version of a TIME.com column I did recently on Internet TV boxes–Apple TV, Roku, Google TV, and the upcoming Boxee Box.)

As much fun as it is to write for the Web, it’s fun for the world of Technologizer to burst off the Internet and into a magazine, too–and I couldn’t ask for a cooler home than TIME. Buy a few copies and tell your friends!

James Cameron, Eric Schmidt, and You: Win a Ticket to a Silicon Valley Event

James Cameron is the director of the two most successful movies of all time–Avatar and Titanic–and one of the film industry’s leading technologists. Eric Schmidt is the CEO of the biggest company on the Web, Google. This Wednesday night, October 27th, the Churchill Club–a cool Silicon Valley organization that sponsors events with interesting people from the world of technology and beyond–is presenting the two of them in conversation at the Fairmont hotel in San Jose, California.

I’ll be there. Better still, so can you–if you’re the winner of a drawing we’re doing to give away one complimentary ticket to the event (normally $99 for Churchill Club members).

What if you don’t live near San Jose? We’re also giving away a complimentary pass for a live Web stream of the event you can watch from anywhere. It’s a $9.95 value.

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Help Us Pick the Last Gadget Standing!

For a decade, one of the most popular events at January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas has been Last Gadget Standing–a live battle between the show’s niftiest new gizmos to pick a single best-of-CES winner. I’m delighted to announce that next year’s edition is being cohosted by Technologizer. We’ll be working with Living in Digital Times (founded by the creator of Last Gadget Standing, my friend Robin Raskin). And a bunch of tech mavens will serve as judges.

Here’s a cool part: You can help us choose the winner, even if you won’t be anywhere near Vegas during CES time. As nominees for the competition come in, we’ll be blogging about them and asking for your input–and, as we get closer, letting you cast votes. (The posts will show up both here on Technologizer’s home page and at Last Gadget Standing’s site.) That’s how we’ll winnow the field to ten finalists who will face off at CES. It should be a lot of fun–and I can’t wait to learn which product is this year’s big winner.

Facebook: How to Love It (or Leave It)

Hey, it’s Tuesday, the day that TIME.com publishes the original Technologizer column which I write for it each week. The new one is titled “A Five-Step Program for Facebook Happiness,” and  I was moved to write it after Facebook introduced a new Groups feature last week that managed to be simultaneously neat and annoying. It dawned on me that while I sometimes grouse about the site–especially its chaotic approach to introducing new features–I’m ultimately a fan, because I’ve figured out how to make it work for me. In this column, I share some tips for making it work for you. (Or acknowledging that it doesn’t work for you: Quitting Facebook is a perfectly defensible decision, although there seem to be a lot more people who say they will leave than actually pull the trigger…)

Join Me for Live Coverage of the Windows Phone 7 Launch

I’m heading to New York for the official launch of Windows Phone 7, cohosted by Microsoft and AT&T, and will liveblog the news as it happens at technologizer.com/windowsphone7. There are still quite a few days about the phones that haven’t been announced, so it should be a good time–even if the rumors of tablet-related surprises don’t pan out.

Coverage begins at 9:30am (that’s eastern time, unlike most of our live events). Hope to see you there!

Got Any Questions for Zappos’ Tony Hsieh?

I’m not a customer of shoe/fashion/housewares superstore Zappos, but I’ve never met anyone who was and didn’t rave about the site. So I’m pleased to have been invited to guest-tweet a live Webcast with Zappos founder/CEO Tony Hsieh this Friday, September 24, at 2pm PT.  I’ll watch, listen, and tweet some thoughts as I do.

The topic of the Webcast is “Service and the Evolution of the New Customer,” and I doubt that there’s a merchant on the Web who knows more about the subject than Hsieh. (He recently wrote a New York Times bestseller about it.)

You can participate (and share your own questions and impressions via Twitter) by joining us here on Friday. In the meantime, if you’ve got any questions for Hsieh, feel free to share them as a comment on this post–we’ll round ‘em up for the Webcast.

(Full disclosure: Like other Webcasts I’ve observed and tweeted, this one is sponsored by HP and hosted at one of its sites. The hashtag for the event is #hpio.)

Technologizer on TIME.com

I mentioned a month ago that I’d be writing a weekly column for TIME.com starting in September. Well, here we are: My first column is live, and new ones will show up each Tuesday. I’ll give you a heads up as they appear.

Column #1 is about how tough it’s going to be for the result of the industry to build iPad competitors that are, indeed, competitive. It’s called “Will the First Real iPad Rivals Please Show Up?“