2009 is coming to a close, which means it's time to reflect on the events that shaped the last twelve months. And there's nothing like a whirlwind animated musical to put everything into perspective. Cue JibJab, which has just released their annual Year In Review: a two minute video romp that recaps the last year in all its glory. The video is packed will everything from momentous events like the induction of our first black President to moments of unparalleled stupidity (Balloon Boy). Even Three Wolf Moon made the cut.

This is the fifth year that JibJab has produced their Year In Review, and we're told it will be seeing airtime on a number of national television networks tomorrow. For those wondering how the video was made, the company has put together a thorough blog post detailing its production.

Only the truly adventurous are running Chrome OS on their computers today. But it's the elephant in the room whenever Jolicloud, an ambitious netbook operating startup, is discussed.

We first covered the startup in late 2008, when netbooks were mostly running Widows XP or Linux. In June, when the first invites to Jolicloud went out, it looked like a winner.

I caught up with CEO Tariq Krim and Director Partnerships Brenda O'Connell backstage at Le Web and asked them how Jolicloud would compete with Chrome OS.

Here’s another red-hot watch podcast for all you watch fans out there. Happy Holidays and enjoy.

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Last summer, when Apple pulled third-party Google Voice applications from the App Store, one of them was VoiceCentral. Apple's subsequent rejection of the official Google Voice app spurred an FCC investigation, but Google Voice never made it to the app store and none of the other apps ever made it back in.

Well, that's not stopping the developers behind VoiceCentral. They are bringing back their app to the iPhone via the browser. They call it the Black Swan edition. You can get on a waiting list to be on the private beta here. The app is completely browser-based but has the look and feel of a regular app, complete with a dialer, list of transcribed voicemails, and SMS messages.

I'm not an RC gadget expert, but modding static model kits of space ships so that they're water-proof and can be RC-controlled to make them then "fly underwater" seems like a very, very geeky thing to do to me. Take this 1/350 scale replica of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-A space ship from Star Trek, for example.

Some person [JP] in Yokosuka, Japan, bought the static kit and transformed it into a space ship that can move and be RC-controlled underwater. The people belonging to the "underground" circle of these self-made gadgets call themselves "Aqua Modelers" and meet up on a regular basis [IT] to exchange ideas and show off their works each year. The last one apparently just took place a couple of days ago.

Video after the jump.

Funny story on Dutch business blog Sprout this morning: Soocial, an Amsterdam-based digital contact management startup, talks about its quarrels with actor and singer David Hasselhoff.

Here's how the story started: Soocial, an angel investor-backed startup that provides a simple but powerful contact synchronization service for both the Web and mobile phones, figured 'hassle-free address book management' fit its core product perfectly as a description when it was founded about two years ago.

FriendFeed's return of its realtime Twitter feed is a great end to a turbulent year. Watching the river flow is a maddening exercise in gauging the value of the stream, but having the option again is invigorating as much as it underlines the futility of keeping up. That's where the Kindle comes in. Kindle is a vacation from the stream; it's checking into the Millstream motel and communing with old friends and old-is-new ideas.

2009 has been a challenging year, particularly on a human level. Personally, I've seen friendships turn to dust as the economic crisis grinds the once-carefree impulses of the realtime Web into marketing and posturing. As someone who writes columns and produces the Gillmor Gang, certainly we all are guilty of these crimes. What I saw as a declaration of the obvious (RSS is dead) continues to roil the conversation, but the damage to a longstanding friendship with Dave Winer seems substantial. Perhaps the friendship that founders on disagreement is not the loss it once might have been.

On the plus side, the massive success of social media and its drivers has rendered moot the criticism that these issues and personalities are not worthy of the enterprise or indeed any serious pursuit of one's time. As a product of the Sixties, if anything the connection between industry and my passion for technology, the arts, and comedy has become so pervasive that I would be virtually unrecognizable to myself from that era. I have become my father, mother, cop, and judge even as I struggle to make the mortgage and ease my kids into the unknowable future. Tech feels to me like the sessions for some potentially great record, or the noodlings of some robotic drum machine.

I haven't seen the Lizard movie yet, but from afar it seems more on the side of science fantasy than fiction. I'm sure I'm wrong, but for now I'll preserve that standoffish pose I took with Twitter and Facebook and the Kindle — knowing full well I'd soon join the stumbling herd but glad to p

Play Borderlands. You’ll love it and the fact that Gearbox Software keeps releasing modest-sized expansions rocks. The last one, Dr. Ned’s Zombie Island, provided me with a weekend of fun and the next one previewed above, looks just as great. So sit back [...]

Six months ago I wrote about a startup called Shopkick (it was then called MOBshop). The company won’t disclose much of what their eventual product will be, but they’ve attracted some of the most high profile investors in Silicon Valley: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Reid Hoffman.
Here’s what CEO Cyriac Roeding will say about [...]

According to the Mercury News, cops in San Jose will soon be wearing head-mounted video cameras to record their interaction with civilians. The devices will sit above their ears and they will be activated whenever they speak with a citizen or suspect. The videos will then be uploaded to a central server. Presumably these things turn off when the officers are in the toilet.

Why is this happening? Because people don't trust cops right now. The system, called AXON, can also attach to other parts of the body.

Most people would probably view a hardcore, 16 hour-a-day addiction to World of Warcraft as a bad thing. That was certainly the case for Hubert Thieblot a few years ago, when he dropped out of school and his parents decided to kick him out of the house because he was playing so much. Flash forward five years. Thieblot has managed to turn his addiction into a thriving company called Curse that generated over $3 million in revenue this year. Today, the company is disclosing a $6 million Series B round it closed in early 2009 with participation from Ventech Capital, AGF Private Equity, and SoftTech VC (Jeff Clavier). The round brings Curse's total funding to $11 million, after a $5 million Series A round in 2007 led by AGF Private Equity.

In some senses, Curse is akin to a SourceForge for computer games, in that it offers a directory of plugins that players can use to customize and enhance their PC games. Many of the site's users are World of Warcraft fans, who have made Curse.com the definitive site for WoW add-ons. Alongside its directory, Curse also makes a native client players can use to manage their plugins.

The iPhone is already touted for its gaming prowess almost endlessly, but it looks like things are about to take a pretty big leap forward. Epic Games has been crackin' away at an iPhone port of their Unreal Engine 3 -- the engine that powers such jaw-droppingly beautiful games as BioShock, Mirror's Edge, Gears of War 2, and a bunch of others -- and they're now far enough along that they're looking to show it off.

This is just cool. The pic is of a camera blast shield that's used to capture those spectacular but deadly explosion videos. The best part is that this is homemade device seems somewhat easy to make. That is, of course, if you're interested in building a camera to record all the shit you blow up. Video after the jump.

Quick, which company was founded first: Facebook or Youtube? What year did Apple launch the Jesus phone? Can you name three of the biggest financial calamities of the past decade? The three-minute video after the jump from WatchMojo recaps the decade in business and technology.

The video strangely alternates between the fraud and financial crises of the general business world (Enron, the housing bubble, Bernie Madoff) and all the change and innovation of the tech world (Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, the iPhone). It's as though it is talking about two different worlds or two different eras. If the next decade is going to be anything like the last one, I'll stay in the tech world.

It's another humanoid from Japan, it doesn't have an official name yet, but it's pretty cool: This new robot [JP] is the result of a collaboration between various Japanese companies and institutions, namely the Nippon Institute of Technology, Harada Vehicle Design [JP], ZMP and ZNUG Design. Based technically on ZMP's Nuvo robot, it stands 1.26m tall and weighs 15kg.

Monstrous Company is today announcing that it has raised a $400,000 round of angel funding to compete in the mobile gaming space. And alongside the announcement, the 2009 Founder Institute graduate is formally unveiling its first game, Entranced, an iPhone games that melds music and visuals into a compelling experience.

Fans of games like Tap Tap Revenge, Rez, and even Guitar Hero will probably most appreciate Entranced, as it's a game that requires you to listen to music and play along on the screen by tapping different colored objects and they come along. It's all about timing, as you must hit these objects at the right time for them to explode (or "bloom") and keep you alive. Rather than having objects that you tab as they come down the screen at you, these objects in Entranced can be anywhere, which makes it a bit challenging at times. Each music track features its own custom visuals, the company notes. There are 5 worlds you can play in Entranced with the promise of more to come.

A number of pictures have hit the web now showing the Nexus One, aka the Google Phone, in the flesh. But there haven't been too many showing its packaging, and it getting unboxed. Today, some Twitpics shared by one user show those. As a bonus, he also shows off a bit of its HTC-innards, and even shared a nice little video of the device in action.

The Nexus One is expected to be released early next year sold both unlocked from Google and in partnership with at least one major carrier. Plenty of Googlers already have the device and have been going around all over the country showing it off. There was previously a video of it booting up, but apparently Google made the YouTube user take it down.

Twitter Search is great — except when 99.9% of the results are from people you could care less about. While Twitter has been working on relevancy, one easy fix that should have been in place a while ago is just a way to search the tweets of the people you follow. Before FriendFeed more or less died post-Facebook sale, it offered such a feature with its search. Now a new service, Flocking.me, brings the same thing to Twitter.

Flocking.me works exactly as you'd expect. Once you authenticate yourself via OAuth, you're taken to your customized Flocking.me screen where the tweets of the people you follow are displayed. Front and center is a big search box where you can search and yes, it will return results of just the people you follow. Better still, you can change the view of the results from straight stream, to stacks of tweets to fit more on the screen. And you can even turn on a map view to see where those tweets originated from. You can also filter search further using your Twitter Lists.

Many social networks these days offer some sort of instant messaging chatting element. The problem is that people are already chatting on a half dozen other services throughout the day. Justin.tv is launching a way to tie some of the big ones together on its site.

Its new unified chat option launching today allows users to pull their Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter conversations into Justin.tv. These are then all displayed in a single chat window that resides on the right hand side of the page.

Outside of a completely simulated appearance in a commercial, we've been hard-pressed in finding any video of the LG eXpo's projector attachment in action. We expected to see some hit the Tubes after the handset launched last week - alas, the projector accessory still hasn't hit the shelves.

Fortunately, the guys over at MobileSyrup have managed to scrounge one up north of the border.