As we approach the Christmas break, most technology blogs are publishing their personal lists of what really mattered in 2011. I just tweeted TechCrunch’s Top 20 iOS Apps, where I fully agree on the first position given to Flipboard and I decided to give Snapseed a try.

That’s the essence of it: end-of-the-year lists give you a chance to appreciate the good things you got and to catch up with what you missed.

However, I believe it’s also important to look back at the lessons one has learnt the hard way. Perhaps 2011 will be remembered as the year when people started truly realizing the unsustainability of an economic system where Asia buys the debt of Western countries to keep them consuming beyond their means and purchasing products made in Asia, in a meaningless race that is trashing the world and making us feel increasingly unfulfilled.

I don’t know if we’ll still have a Euro currency in one year’s time, but either way I hope we’ll be able to start tossing out the unhealthy excesses that globalization has brought to us.

I’ve written about The Story of Stuff before. Today I’d like to follow up by pre-embedding The Story of Technology, focused on the market I love and where so much could be done to protect our only world… without missing any of the great fun we’re having!

Articles and talks about an alleged new Internet bubble are increasingly common, and sometimes encouraged by the creation of companies whose business model is easily summarized in one sentence: “we’ll figure it out!”

However, no one can argue that the Internet is just a trend for geeks any more.

As brilliant start-ups are founded every day, the gang of four (Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google) keeps crunching every growth forecast and changing our lives in unprecedented ways. Yes, final users are still at the very centre of this revolution.

The numbers below, beautifully rendered by the guys at Go Gulf, talk by themselves…

I’ve recently read Inspired by Marty Cagan, a clever journey across the best practices and most common mistakes of product management.

A lot of thoughts (and resolutions) were blending inside my mind after turning the last page over… well, in a metaphysical sense, for I was using an e-book reader! What I want to briefly share here is the outcome of an interview with Jeff Bonforte, an experienced executive at Yahoo!, that the author includes in the book.

Mr Bonforte basically adds a layer of analysis to the famous technology adoption curve, based on which emotions drive the users of each group. This leads to interesting results, which I think can have a role in helping product managers develop “valuable, usable and feasible” products (to quote Marty Cagan)… or, in more traditional words, to avoid Moore’s “chasm” after the early adopters phase.

Of course these definitions are not innovative and revolutionary by themselves. But we’ll never be careful enough at studying the frustrations, emotions and expectations of common people as we develop new products…

This is among the lessons Marty Cagan reinforced with his great book.

Last week I listened to a nice speech by the “curious journalist” Roberto Bonzio. He talked about his project Italiani di Frontiera and proposed a fascinating list of Italian characters who can boast histories of success abroad.

One especially impressed me for his relentless spirit of enterpreneurship.

Amadeo Giannini was a young independent banker, used to offer small loans mainly to a small community of people with his same Italian heritage. When a disastrous earthquake hit San Francisco in 1906, he started building his success story (and helped rebuilding the city) by making substantial loans to many hard-working people, as opposed to the usual bankers’ policy of servicing wealthy customers only.

This way, Mr Giannini basically invented what we currently call venture capital.

A few years later he was among the main financers of an obscure movie titled The Kid, then helped his creator Charlie Chaplin found a brand-new studio named United Artists.

He kept financing risky projects through his entire life, meeting success and failure… and – I guess – treating these two impostors just the same.

It is told that when Amadeo Giannini died in 1949 at age 79, his personal fortune was relatively modest, but hundreds of ordinary people showed up at his funeral. Meanwhile his bank had become a giant, and is today the largest in the United States: have you ever seen Bank of America‘s logo around?

History says that Silicon Valley has experienced such a rapid growth, from agricultural land south of San Francisco to the world’s center of innovation, thanks to people like Amadeo Giannini: able to spread a sense of urgency for progress and risk-taking. Other examples include Stanford graduates like Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, who started a long tradition of successful tech companies founded in garages.

So, which is the answer to this post title? At the end of his second mandate, Tony Blair flew to Silicon Valley and asked the same question to company executives such as Apple’s Steve Jobs and Cisco’s John Chambers. They made him observe the strict relationship between university campuses and the corporate world, and emphasized their relentless pursuit of meritocracy.

So sad that Amadeo Giannini’s country of origin is still light-years far from that…

What happens when the marginal cost of serving online customers turns out to be almost zero? Chris Anderson’s Free offers a complete and clever answer to that question, written with the same compelling style of The Long Tail.

It shows how the Web has enabled a brand-new class of business models, and thus become such a Wonder Land of free, high-quality applications and services.

I really loved reading the book. And I got positively impressed even by a speech Anderson recently delivered in Milan, about the disruptive effect of the Internet over so many brick-and-mortar businesses.

So what the hell crossed his mind when he recently wrote and published an article titled The Web is Dead?…

Ok: he wanted to remark the rising power of the Apps, which is undoubtedly a fact. Granted: as editor in chief at Wired, he needs to push the magazine sales even by purposely triggering some buzz and squabble.

But I believe that statement is far too much.

A lot of reasons have already been pointed out by critics across the Web.

In a nutshell, my own can be described as follows:

- yes, the Apps are a big success for their ability to drive dedicated experiences, ideal for handling specific tasks… so no wonder that many companies and organizations are betting on them to attract customers into their own walled gardens, out of the Web…

- but the Web is alive and in very good shape indeed, because it gives its best just where the Apps struggle: universal compatibility. Today I can handle most of my online activities on nearly every devices… regardless of their operating system (and even by borrowing someone else’s laptop for a few minutes or getting in a cyber cafe)… AS LONG AS THEY HAVE A WEB BROWSER.

iPhone, Android and their likes have definitely changed the way we define a smartphone, so quickly that most of the competitors are still struggling to catch up.

Although I consider myself a techno-fan and I’m often among first adopters of consumer technologies, this time I’m sticking with my 3-years-old Nokia E71 for a little while.

After all I guess we can still call it a smartphone, even though its screen is non-touch and quite small on current standards. In fact the following points still make it a very good companion:

- comfortable QWERTY keyboard (say what you want, touch-screen-addicted readers, but I bet I can text faster than you!)

- still up-to-date hardware equipment, including wi-fi, 3G, bluetooth and GPS

- embedded Mail-for-Exchange client

- availability of free applications for those features most of us use the most: Gmail, Google Maps, Ovi Maps, Facebook, YouTube, Skype, Nimbuzz (a multi-service chat client)…

Not enough? You’re right.

The final, critical ingredient is Joikuspot. This smart program connects to the Internet in 3G and shares that connection via wi-fi, turning the E71 (and many other phones) into a wi-fi hotspot in a snap.

Only recently added in some smartphones natively, this feature is usually defined “wi-fi tethering”.

Think about the possibilities. I mainly enjoy the latest apps on my iPod Touch and download new content from everywhere on my e-book reader… but one could even surf the Internet with two notebooks at the same time from a beach…

Just get a 3G flat data tariff before!

Recent articles about Blockbuster Video’s upcoming bankruptcy, with Chapter 11 approaching and no apparent strategy for a relaunch, make me pretty sad: I believe it’s such a shame!

Let me explain why. During a couple of business trips I’ve been reading Inside Steve’s Brain, a smart book about a guy who definitely knows how to make a difference: Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs. I already knew how troubled Apple Inc was in the late 1990s, when Jobs took its role back after many years out of the company. Thanks to that book, I discovered some serious similarities between today’s Blockbuster and 15 years ago’s Apple Inc. For instance:

- Apple had a huge set of different products and versions, without anything close to a precise focus or strategy -> Blockbuster has started losing money from its hundreds of shops, and now is acting as a confused late follower in those adjacent markets responsible for its crisis (from online rentals to automated kiosks)

- Jobs immediately identified Apple’s brand as the most valuable asset to start a relaunch from -> Blockbuster’s blue and yellow logo is still synonym of “cinema” across most of the Western countries

Not enough? Sure, it’s hard for everyone to be compared with the cool and innovative Apple we all know. But let’s go back to 1997, when Apple’s logo had rainbow stripes and the Power Macintosh had the appearance you can see here on the left.

Yes, a different era. But Jobs started his unbelievable series of best seller products with the iMac (here on the right) one year later only.
Big step forward, uh?

Blockbuster could start a new course as well, leveraging one of its supposed weaknesses: the shops. I believe an effective recipe should be based on the so-called “Internet of the Things”.

Movies are not common products. Hollywood’s “dream factory” is not just a claim.

One could enter a Blockbuster store, be recognized by a RFID loyalty card without pulling it out of the wallet… and get amazed by HD trailers, profiled offers and recommendations… with every movie ready to be downloaded on a digital memory in a snap.

A whole new approach, capable of suddenly shifting the company image from the 1980s to 2010 and beyond. Who said customers always want to stay home while choosing a movie? They could be eager to go out, if the shops were able to amuse and entertain them!

When advertisements reach the Super Bowl scene, they’re supposed to push widespread products to the largest audience of the whole year. Therefore tech innovations usually run that stage when they’re ready to turn into mass-market wonders.

As far as I remember, a brick-&-mortar content distributor such as Blockbuster has broadcast a Super Bowl ad only once. Well, this year Vizio has shown how its latest TVs can bring both premium video content and web services to the living room. Through the Internet. In a snap.

The rules of the game are definitely changing…

My blog’s ultimate purpose is building a merge between technology and sustainability. I wish I could neither just write about these two topics in different posts, nor simply delve into the technologies eco-friendly products are produced with.

I’d rather love finding out ways in which consumer oriented technology can help developing a cleaner world, by making what the Internet can do best: eliminate barriers.

Here you go with A Real Tree. Just a few taps on your iPhone screen, and for $0.99 a real tree will be planted on your behalf in a developing country facing deforestation. Then the application will give you a real-time (estimated) glimpse on how your tree is doing. Check it out!

The New Year always carries assessments about what happened and resolutions for the following twelve months. Someone also looks back at past predictions, seizing the moment to evaluate them with hindsight.

By applying all of this to consumer electronics, I think Apple’s iPhone has determined the most relevant market trend across 2009, being much more than the excellent niche product someone had initially considered it. While touch screens and widgets/applications have swiftly become a must for everyone out there, I’m asking myself: what’s going to play a similar role in 2010?

My bet is on ebook readers.

On the way to explain this statement, let’s make one step back. Gartner, a market research firm, believes every technologies go through a hype cycle before gaining a widespread diffusion: after a peak of inflated expectations, there’s a “trough of disillusionment” before the technology reaches the “slope of enlightment”.

In Gartner’s 2009 Hype Cycle Report, issued in July 2009, ebook readers were placed at the maximum level of expectations, just before the disillusionment phase.

Six months later, I believe this phase could be almost over. Using the chart below as an instruction manual, ebook readers are in my opinion where competition increases and second generation products reach the market.

Time (the horizontal axis) is running so fast that ebook readers could be climbing the slope in six months, when Gartner’s next report is expected to be issued.

This technology has the potential to eventually change the way we’ve been reading for centuries. The Internet is already doing it for news and every other short/medium length text. Ebook readers could finish the job.

The huge retailer Amazon, originally born just as a bookshop, is leading the ebook readers market not by accident with its Kindle, whose DX version has gained worldwide 3G coverage just today (the more popular Kindle 2 already had it).

Moreover, the potentially most brilliant competitor happens to be the Nook from Barnes & Noble, a US-based bookseller. The Nook is still young but adds a small LCD touch screen for navigation and is powered by Android operating system, which could support interesting features like (back to the 2009 must-haves) widgets.

This means one thing: content eventually rules over features.

No matter what Sony or others are going to launch in technical terms. A seamless access to books and magazines is definitely the key aspect.