Jan 1st 2007
This Week in Tech 82
The Year In Review
Hosted by
Leo Laporte
A look back at the stories that made 2006, and what's ahead for 2007...
Records live every Sunday at 5:15pm Eastern / 2:15pm Pacific / 21:15 UTC.
A look back at the stories that made 2006, and what's ahead for 2007...
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 explodingbecause 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.