I’m getting ready to head for one of my favorite tech conferences, Austin’s South by Southwest Interactive, which starts this Friday and goes well into the next week. I’ll mostly be hanging out, meeting interesting people, and looking for cool companies to write about–but I’ll also be part of two official events at the show.

Official event #1: On Monday, March 14th at 12:3pm in room 12AB in the ScreenBurn section at the Austin Convention Center, I’ll moderate a panel called “Platform Success: Earning Developers’ Trust, Hearts, and Minds.” Panelists include Peter Hoddie of Marvell, Brandon Watson of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 team, James Keller of iOS developer Small Society, and Ben Satterfield, the CEO of TestFlight.

Official event #2: On Tuesday, March 15th at 3pm at the SxSW Block Party, I’ll be doing my darndest to fare well in a competition called Das IronGeek, which pits a few folks against each other in a tech tournament including a typing race, a build-your-own server competition, and other challenges, including at least one they haven’t told me about yet. (I competed last year, in the inaugural edition, and didn’t do so well–but this year I’ll prevail. Or at try not to embarrass myself.)

Hope to see some you at one (or both) of these events, or just around town.

I had fun speaking at Macworld about the future of the mobile market last Wednesday. (Below, for no particular reason other than that I like it, is an image from my presentation–making the point that Android is less like Windows and more like Linux–actually, it is Linux under the skin.) I had even more fun listening to the guy who spoke after me–Bill Atkinson, who was one of the principal creators of the Mac in the early 1980s and who’s now (among other things) an iPhone developer. And I enjoyed walking the show floor Thursday morning.

When Apple announced in December of 2008 that it was puling out of Macworld, there were plenty of folks who predicted that the show would be dead within a year or two. And it did go through a great downsizing in 2010–but it may have found a new, more modest equilibrium. The show had 270 exhibitors this year and conference organizer IDG says it went into the event expecting 25,000 attendees; last year’s edition had “over” 250 exhibitors and “more than” 20,000 attendees. (The 2009 show, the last that Apple was present for, had 400 exhibitors and more than 28,000 attendees.)

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I liked CES 2011. I found it useful and fun. I’m glad I went. None of those reactions were a given–I understand why some folks question the show’s very reasons for existing, and I’ve been known to accentuate the negative myself.  This year, however, there was a critical mass of interesting stuff, in multiple categories.

From Tuesday afternoon of last week through Saturday, I spent so much time learning about new products that I didn’t cover all that many of them here while the show was going on. So here’s a catch-up post with a few of the ones that made this CES one of the best ones in my memory–despite the insane crowds, the aisles and aisles of lookalike phone covers, and the jingling case of  slot-machine tinnitus that I still can’t quite shake.

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About twenty years after I attended my first Macworld Expo, I’m tickled to be speaking at one. Week after next, I’m part of a new Macworld feature called the Industry Forum, which consists of quick presentations by a bunch of folks–other speakers include Macworld Editorial Director Jason Snell, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, Mac founding father Bill Atkinson, and others.

As usual, Macworld is at San Francisco’s Moscone Center; I go on Wednesday, January 26th at 10:40am. (The conference sessions run from January 25th-29th and the show floor opens on the 27th.) My topic is “Thoughts on Mobile,” and I plan to spend twenty minutes exploring the current state of competition between iOS devices and their competition and mulling over where it may lead in the months and years to come.

Hope to see you there!

At every CES, there’s one company–usually in a small booth off the beaten track–with the single best name at the show.

In 2011, that company was Dream Cheeky.

The suspense is over! Yesterday morning, a standing-room-only throng of CES attendees attended the tenth annual Last Gadget Standing event (co-sponsored by Technologizer and LGS creator Robin Raskin’s Living in Digital Times), and witnessed demos–from the straightforward to the wild and crazy–from the ten finalists. Then they voted for their favorite gizmos by clapping, cheering, whistling, hooting, and hollering.

The Last Gadget Standing–as determined by applause-o-meter at the event is Acer’s Iconia, a notebook with two 14-inch screens and a touchscreen interface. And the People’s Choice winner–determined by an online poll–is Barnes & Noble’s Nookcolor “reader’s tablet.”

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My TIME.com Technologizer column for this week is a CES preview of sorts: I explain why it’s dangerous to accept the show’s big news at face value until products have reached stores and consumers have had the chance to give them a yay or nay. And then I list a few products and categories which I’ll be on the lookout for.

I head to the show on Tuesday afternoon–the show floor doesn’t open until Thursday, but stay tuned for news as I encounter it throughout the week…

Let’s see, we’ve had Elvis impersonators, roving robots, Dr. Evil, mad scientists….could Last Gadget Standing get even kookier?  I’m afraid so.

Next week’s tenth-anniversary edition could be it. In addition to me, Harry McCracken, and your judging team, the event will be hosted by Jon Hein and special guest Gary “Baba Booey” Dell’Abate from The Wrap up Show on the Howard Stern channel on SiriusXM Radio. Hein’s tech claim to fame came is the creation of Jump the Shark, devoted to the moments where there’s only one way to go: downhill. (Just ask Fonzie).

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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.

If you attend as many tech conferences as I do, today’s biggest hazard isn’t rubber chicken or pricey parking–it’s Wi-Fi that just doesn’t work. Wi-Fi expert Glenn Fleishman explains why it’s difficult–but not impossible–to deliver fast, reliable wireless Internet to large crowds.

Cord cutting–getting rid of cable or satellite TV–is the buzzword du jour in the TV and electronics industries. Pundits have proclaimed TV dead, or at least dying00going the way of the recording industry, which went from pricey CDs to cheaper downloads and now to mostly-free streaming.

That was the juiciest topic last Friday at New York University during the Future of Television Conference, a gathering of TV brass such as the CEO’s of Showtime and Univision, senior executives from MTV Networks, Discovery, and Yahoo, and founders of Internet video startups. The subject also permeated Pepcom’s Wine, Dine & Demo  tech show the night before, where about a half-dozen Internet-to-TV products were being shown.

The conclusion, at least to this reporter, is that cord cutting is about as real now as growing new organs in vats. Consumers will do it–but they won’t do it in droves just yet.

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David Spark is a veteran tech journalist that’s been covering the TechCrunch Disrupt conference for Yammer. Check out more of Spark’s coverage on Yammer’s blog.

Remember the search engine AltaVista? Ever wonder whatever happened to it? Nothing. It’s actually still a search engine. You’ve just completely forgotten about it and haven’t bothered to actually go to the site and check it out. But it’s still there and it still searches the Web. Why not take a look now?

The reason I mention AltaVista is because its cofounder, Louis  Monier, is also the cofounder of Qwiki, a very cool search application that creates video stories on the fly based on your searches. The technology incorporates open resources such as photos on Flickr and descriptions on Wikipedia to create its instant video slideshows. But this is just the tip of the iceberg, says Monier, explaining that this is just a first demo of a technology with lots more to come. Unfortunately I couldn’t coax that “more to come” out of him when I stopped by Qwiki’s booth before the service won the “best of show” award at TechCrunch Disrupt to get a demo of his application.

David Spark is a veteran tech journalist and the founder of the firm Spark Media Solutions, which gives voice to companies by building their media network. Spark appeared on the last episode of Cranky Geeks this past week, and blogs regularly at Spark Minute. Follow him on Twitter @dspark.

A Couple weeks ago I attended the AppNation conference in San Francisco, an event for companies that create, distribute, and (try to) monetize mobile apps. (I was reporting on the event for Dice, the online job board for tech jobs). You can see a bunch of the videos I shot at the event at DiceOutLoud and DiceNews, but here’s a video showcasing some of the coolest apps I saw at the conference.

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When Wired hyperbolically declared that “The Web is Dead,” it didn’t challenge my worldview but rather surfaced what I knew subconsciously. The browser is not always (and increasingly less so) the best window to the Internet — especially on mobile gadgets. For years on my iPhone — and now on my Droid – I’ve foregone digging around in a tiny browser in favor of burrowing straight to what I want through an app – the New York Times, Facebook, The Weather Channel…

At this week’s Web 2.0 conference in New York, John Gruber of blog Daring Fireball tried to illustrate app supremacy by showing the absurdity of an iPad screen with only the Safari Web browser icon.

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I just got back from Seattle where I attended Gnomedex, reporting and shooting video interviews for Dice and Dice News. For those of you who haven’t been, Gnomedex is the brainchild of Chris Pirillo, the guy who started Lockergnome and who was the host of Call for Help on TechTV. It’s an annual tech conference that has no agenda, yet speaks to upcoming trends in technology and the Internet. Attendees purchase $300 tickets even though they don’t know what they’re going to see. Once Pirillo books the event, a theme eventually emerges. This year’s theme spoke to the power of the individual to create and affect change. There were speakers who made their own fan film, one who built censorship-evading software (Austin Heap), and a couple building a sustainable tech-enabled home in the country.

For my complete summary of the event, check out my article “The Cool and Not-Co-Cool from Gnomedex.”

And to give you an idea the geek cred that attends the conference, here’s a video of attendees and presenters answering the question, “What makes you a true geek?”

For more of my video coverage from Gnomedex, check out the YouTube videos on DiceNews and DiceOutLoud.

(Photo of Chris Pirillo: Derek K. Miller.)

Tomorrow at 9:30am, Google is holding a press event at its San Francisco offices. Not surprisingly, it isn’t saying much about the topic other than that it involves search, that it’ll be “brief,” and that it features “a few new things we think you’ll be interested to see.” Marissa Mayer, the company’s VP of Search Products and User Experience, will preside.

I’ll be in the audience and will liveblog the news as it happens, and hope you’ll join me. Visit technologizer.com/google-search-event for our coverage.