Essentially, the internet goes from something you sit down at a computer to use to something that connects everything in our daily life together.

I missed on a lot of the renewable energy stuff – wind is definitely getting going with lots of agreements and more work being done on transmission infrastructure, and solar is hurting and didn’t get any sort of comeback this year. Large deals have been made but there isn’t a whole lot of upwards movement in the market.

Apple

• Apple does, along with a few other companies, releases various 7-10″ tablets. (OK, at the time of publication this is a foregone conclusion, but when I wrote this in the middle of December it wasn’t). Apple’s cost the most, but you get the most (e.g. the App Store). Other tablets don’t have the battery life or applications to match up.
• Apple continues to see growth of 20-30% year over year in computer sales (this number will vary depending on how they categorize the “iSlate” – as a computer or a iPhone-ish device, or its own category).
• The iPhone does go Verizon in July (probably announced earlier), AT&T counter by offering tiered monthly data plans – $20 for 250MB or less, $30 for 1GB or less, $45 for anything over 1GB. They do the rate structure in such a way that there aren’t really overage charges, you just get moved into the next tier (if you use 1.01GB of data, its $45).
• AT&T’s network continues to suck and iPhone users continue to complain. Verizon’s iPhone helps but AT&T doesn’t seem to care too much about network performance.
• The iPhone does not go 4G (LTE or WiMax) in 2010. Its expected to go LTE in 2011 as Verizon gets 50 markets online and AT&T still sucks with HSPA 7.2Mb/s network.
• The iPhone does get bumped to 64GB/32GB/16GB for the same prices ($299/199/99). The 3G iPhone goes away and all phones are 3GS. It doesn’t look like a processor or RAM speed bump is in the cards, but there are some new (risky?) features that get added.

Tech

• LED LCDs dominate 2010. Internet connectivity becomes prominent as TV manufacturers push streaming video on demand services like Netflix and YouTube.
• 3D TVs are introduced but don’t get adopted. Avatar gets released in September as the first true 3D Blu-Ray disk, but since BR hasn’t taken off it doesn’t go anywhere.
• 2010 still isn’t the year of Blu-Ray. Its getting close though! Players are available at $99 by Black Friday and things start to pick up for the holidays. I’m still not sure if broadband speeds will increase fast enough to take Blu-Ray out completely.

Green

• Wind continues to dominate the green generation sector. Transmission projects also start to get under construction in the second half.
• Solar recovers a little. But the problem is that the people wanting to middle-scale solar (between 1MW and 10MW and not utilities) don’t have the money and cant get loans to do it. Where available, PACE (property assessed financing) helps individual home owners defray the cost of putting solar power on their own homes by adding the price into their annual property tax assessment for a low interest rate (4-5%), so even if they move the next owner is paying for it through property tax.
• Geothermal still gets little love. 20MW here and 10MW there. No magic increase that gets geothermal to be some huge part of generation.
• Biofuels and biomass start to transition into more mainstream. You see a lot of coal plants augmenting their coal-fired boilers with wood, trying to reduce net CO2 output.
• EVs (Volt, Leaf, etc.) don’t make that big of a splash in the personal transport market because they cant get out that many units because of battery production issues (producing the number of cells and modules necessary). The tech turns out to be solid, but its the cost and production issues. Its somewhat disappointing that the cars have so much promise and they have trouble making them in volume.

Other

• I figure out some way to get a girlfriend this year. No idea how long I manage to keep her, but I do manage to get one. I had one date in 2009, but 2010 is better.
• I don’t do all that well in the stock market.
• I manage to write an iPhone app for myself. Don’t know whether I publish it – if its the one I think I’m writing it wont get published because it uses private APIs.

And thats it. See you next year!

The consumer electronics industry is one now driving by computers and microchips, which follows “Moore’s Law”. This law states that the number of transistors (the most basic building blocks of a microchip) doubles every 18 (now 24) months because of advances in technology. For consumers, this means the performance of your computer should double as well. Lately we’ve seen this in dual and quad core CPUs. Bluray players are getting cheaper as manufacturing ramps up, as well as the ability of your cell phone. Slowly but surely, waves of new technologies are infiltrating the consumer electronics sector.

However there is a distinct danger to extending this same law to other industries. Mostly because they cant keep up. I see posts on boards about emerging technologies about how we’ll have batteries the size of a 12V car battery that will take us 300 miles by 2020 and will be dirt cheap. Guess what, it wont happen. To say that’s unrealistic is an understatement, it likely wouldn’t happen for a good 30-50 years. They aren’t completely to blame, there are plenty of researchers out there who are happy to hype technologies, take investor money, promise results in three to five years, and never end up delivering because they couldn’t get it from a lab to manufacturing.

Technology progress is sometimes slow and frustrating. We first went into space in the early 60s, then got to the moon in 1969, over 40 years ago. But today we don’t have flying cars, we haven’t got to Mars, and we’re actually struggling to keep our presence in low earth orbit. We haven’t made a significant reduction in pounds-to-orbit (either LEO or GTO) costs since the mid 1990s when commercial launches started getting competition from China and Russia.

So I approach these big “curve busters” very carefully – extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Sometimes the claims come with disclaimers, where a technology might only work in certain conditions, which is fine if they’re up front about it. But there is no such thing as a free lunch, you aren’t going to get 10 times the performance of a current technology by spreading fairy dust (usually carbon nanotubes) on an existing technology. If it takes another 10 years for batteries to get good enough and cheap enough to allow mass production of plug-in hybrids that can go for miles before you use a drop of gas, then that’s how long it will take.

The presentation was given by Pattie Maes from MIT media labs, and its the work of Pranav Mistry. Basicaly its a projector, camera, a cellphone for processing and internet connectivity and some marker caps stuck on the end of the guy’s fingers. 

Basically what it could deliver is nearly instantaneous information on anything and everything. If you throw enough horsepower, you can know everything. Right now its hooked to a projecter and mirror hung around your neck.

In the future its an OLED film on my glasses (that also doubles as sunglasses) that allows me to see into things. I can look down at the road and tell it to show me the underground utilities. It will access the databases and show me all the underground utilites – sewer, water, electric, etc. The glasses have a tiny magnetic compass and accelerometer to know which way I’m looking and what I’m looking at. It knows how to overlay the image onto my glasses so that I’m seeing the underground utilities as they are, with other information like depth and age. 

Man I want it so bad. I think we will eventually get to the Matrix – we plug ourselves in and live in a virtual world. We wont be forced, we’ll do it willingly.