Hosts: Leo Laporte, John C. Dvorak, Wil Harris, Andy Ihnatko, and Michael Arrington A look back at the stories that made 2006, and what's ahead for 2007...

Thanks to AOL Radio for the bandwidth for this show.

News of 2006:

• Digg recently went through a second round of funding.
• Google acquired YouTube and AMD and ATI merged.
• Godaddy pulled its IPO.
• After completing their internal investigation, Apple has agreed to take on an $84 million charge for misdating stock options.
• HP went through a huge scandal, and their chairwoman resigned.
• Microsoft announced that Bill Gates would step aside in 2008.
• Andy Ihnatko loves Windows Vista.
• Peter Gutmann has done a cost analysis of Windows Vista's content protection.
• Grand Theft Auto caused a furor over the Hot Coffee Mod.
• Senator Stevens spoke out against Net Neutrality and referred to the Internet as a series of tubes.
• Congress dealt a blow to Net Neutrality.
• AT&T made a few Net Neutrality concessions
• Youtube became incredibly popular with the SNL skit Lazy Sunday.
• NBC, at the time, was not content with the copyright infringement.
• Leo interviewed the founders of Youtube and asked if they could handle the lawsuits and bandwidth costs.
• The Venice Project is a new IPTV-related project by the founders of Skype.
• Skype has to be application of the year.
• America Online raised its prices on dialup, then their executives left, and finally the company's services went free.
• Myspace users are moving to Facebook, which is now open to all users.
• Leo's getting 3-4 requests a day on LinkedIn.
• Microsoft officially ended support for Windows 98.
• Canon abandoned film-based SLR cameras.
• Apple and Dell announced battery recalls after their laptops began exploding because of badly made Sony batteries.
• The US Congress banned online gaming.
• Microsoft officially announced its iPod competitor, the Zune.
• The Web turned 15, PC 25, and the hard drive 50.

Predictions

• TechCrunch will have the scoop on the next website News Corp. will buy.
• 2007 will mark the a big OS war between Ubuntu, Windows Vista, and OSX Leopard.
• Google may start selling computers with Google apps. With Firefox and the plethora of Google applications like Google Docs and Spreadsheets, you have a pretty basic desktop suite.
• Firefox will reach the 25% mark in 2007.
• 2007 will mark the end of WiMax if development does not continue.
• HD-DVD will win and Blu-Ray will fade into the darkness. You'll see Blu-Ray on PCs, but for movies, HD-DVD will win.

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