BitTorrent seems to be growing like a weed, just announcing that the company has hit 100 million monthly users of its software, the BitTorrent Mainline and µTorrent. That’s up from 80 million monthly users most recently.

The company also revealed that it has over 20 million daily active users, over 400,000 daily client downloads, and uses are checking into the clients from over 220 countries every day.

Put simply, BitTorrent’s clients make easy for users to downloads large files online. Using the BitTorrent protocol, files are distributed in small pieces from peer-to-peer without the need for centralized data centers. These files are downloaded from many different origins in pieces and are also uploaded in pieces at the same time to other consumers, which means that the more people who are downloading a file, the more who are also concurrently uploading it to others, so availability increases as demand increases.

BitTorrent recently released its annual list of the most popular searches on KickassTorrents; with Inception taking the top spot.

Facebook’s latest round of financing from Goldman Sachs at a $50 billion valuation, which is about the same valuation its shares are trading on SecondMarket, clearly puts it in the pantheon of the most valuable Internet companies. At $50 billion, Facebook is now worth more than Yahoo (which has a $22 billion market cap) and eBay ($37 billion), and almost worth more than both of them combined—and that is before it has even gone public. On the valuation scale of publicly traded Internet companies, however, it is still smaller than Amazon ($83 billion) and Google ($193 billion).

Facebook passed Yahoo in implied valuation last summer. And that feels about right. But is Facebook actually worth $50 billion? Its revenues for 2010 are rumored to be around $2 billion, which gives it a multiple of 25 times revenues. Google, in contrast, is trading at about 9 times estimated 2010 revenues. Of course, Facebook is growing much faster. And what really matters is profits. Facebook is believed to be profitable, but nobody really knows how profitable and there is still a sense that it hasn’t quite perfected its monetization model for social ads.

If anything, Facebook’s desire to push of an IPO as long as possible buys it more time to figure out its business model. Right now, it is just raking in cash based on the fact that 1 in 4 pageviews in the U.S. are on Facebook. It is a volume game, not a quality ad targeting game (yet).

And look at Groupon, which is now valued at about $5 billion with probably half the revenues of Facebook and extremely healthy margins. They are very different businesses with different longterm prospects, but why is one worth ten times more than the other? Something is out of whack. Maybe both are overvalued.

Remember also that private valuations are based on what a handful of wealthy investors are willing to pay—in this case Goldman Sachs, which has other motives as well. By plowing in money now, it moves to the front of the line to manage an eventual IPO. And it has the option to sell a portion of its stake to DST, as well as to sell $1.5 billion worth of shares to Goldman clients through a “special purpose vehicle” designed to skirt the SEC’s 500-shareholder rule, which is when public-level financial disclosure requirements normally kick in.

At $50 billion, though, Facebook is going to have to come out with the biggest IPO in history to justify the current frenzy of private investment. Google’s initial market cap was only half that amount.

A couple of weeks ago, comScore came out with a report that said Microsoft’s Bing had reached an all-time high market share of 11.8% in November 2010.

According to rival Compete, however, Bing’s market share is actually much larger than that.

Based on search data from its panel of more than two million US-based internet users, the Kantar Media company says Bing-powered search engines as a whole grew 4.3 percent month-over-month in query volume, driving Bing’s total market share up by 1 percentage point.

Bing (‘MSFT’) and Yahoo’s search products (which are powered by Bing these days) had 14.4% and 14.6% market share, respectively, which means the combined market share of the search engines rose to a healthy 29% in November 2010, according to Compete’s search data.

Bing.com also saw the highest growth in the number of unique visitors, with a month-over-month increase of 7.4 percent (Yahoo’s number of UVs actually declined .3 percent). In November 2009, Bing’s market share was just over 10%, according to Compete.

Both ASK and AOL’s share remained flat from October 2010 to November 2010, which means there’s only one search engine whose market share effectively declined last November: Google‘s.

According to Compete, Google has seen its query volume decline for the second month in a row now, with a recent 1.1 percent month-over-month drop. Compete registered 66.4% market share for the search engine, down a noteworthy 7 percentage points compared to November 2009.

Excuse the blurry screenshot, but this was the best I could do (see source image).

The impossibly named [x+1], which specializes in online targeting technology, has raised $10 million in a Series B round led by Intel Capital. Existing investors Advanced Technology Ventures, Blue Chip Venture Company and Hudson Venture Partners also participated.

The additional capital will serve to promote adoption of the startup’s media software services and to expand its international reach.

[x+1] provides a so-called “end-to-end Digital Marketing Hub” for advertisers and agencies to optimize engagement rates and lift conversion in both media and on websites.

Its (patented) technology essentially enables delivery of the right ad and content to the right person at the right time.

[x+1] has been around since 1999 and is based in New York.

The company has raised $28 million in funding to date.

,Intel Capital”]

We've spent quite a few posts on Angry Birds in the last months, and now the super-popular smartphone game is coming to the Sony PlayStation 3 (and PlayStation Portable) via this week's PlayStation store update. That's right, you'll get to play Angry Birds on an HD console or a portable gaming system (which doesn't have a touchscreen). Read the rest on CrunchGear.

Vizio might just be the next big consumer electronic’s company with a set of announcements that should make the rest of the industry take notice. The company has long been a top player in the US domestic LCD wars and seems to be set to utilize their brand with a host of new software and hardware options.

VIA Plus: Think the video transporting features of Apple’s AirPlay but instead of iOS devices, this service will hit Vizio products including the just-announced Android VIA Tablet and VIA Phone. According to the short press release, consumers will be able to start watching content on one device and then pick up on another. How? No idea. The techy details will no doubt flow once Vizio’s CES showing gets underway although the presser does make mention that the devices will share a common user interface as shown in the pic above.

The newest Vizio hardware isn’t just limited to the 8-inch tablet or 4-inch phone, though. Just like the rumormill stated a few weeks back, Vizio has at least one upcoming Google TV model. Once again, the details are nonexistent, but the GTV is clearly mentioned in the VIA Plus announcement. CES, here we come!

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Ciris Energy, Inc., a Cenetennial, Colorado energy startup, raised a series B investment of $23.9 million a recent SEC-filing revealed. Khosla Ventures led the round with earlier Ciris backers Braemar Energy Ventures, Rho Ventures and GE Energy Financial Services, the companies announced Monday.

Ciris Energy aims to produce natural gas from coal in a way that is more environmentally responsible and economically efficient than other methods of producing natural gas. It also aims to turn coal into a far less dangerous and polluting energy resource than it is today.

According to a feature story by James Fallows in The Atlantic:

“Mining coal is notoriously dangerous, the remnants of mines disfigure the Earth, and the by-products of coal's combustion fill the air not simply with soot, smoke, and carbon dioxide but also with toxic heavy metals like mercury and lead, plus corrosive oxides of nitrogen and sulfur, among other pollutants…

Overall, coal-burning power plants provide nearly half (about 46 percent this year) of the electricity consumed in the United States. For the record: natural gas supplies another 23 percent, nuclear power about 20 percent, hydroelectric power about 7 percent, and everything else the remaining 4 or 5 percent.”

With its new-found capital, Ciris specificially plans to build its first commercial-scale projects for “in-situ biochemical conversion of coal to methane,” and to bring its “ex-situ biochemical coal conversion technology to commercial-ready status,” the company said in a press statement.

Zynga launched CityVille on Facebook just over a month ago, and according to the application page there are now over 84,222,766 users actively playing the game.

To put that in perspective, there are about 58 million monthly active users for FarmVille, Zynga’s other hit game. CityVille has thus become the largest app ever on the Facebook platform, by a significant margin. The game attracted nearly 2 million new players today alone, and almost 22 million over the past 7 days.

Just look at that nice little curve below, courtesy of AppData.

As Inside Social Games points out, FarmVille logged 83.76 million players in March 2010, an all-time high for any app on the platform at the time (and that was when the rules were slightly different). Consider that record shattered now.

ISG also forecasts 125 million monthly active users for CityVille down the line.

Though growth is bound to level off at some point in the near future, that’s actually a relatively conservative prediction in my book. Looking at the numbers, it appears that CityVille will become the first app/game to surge past 100 million active monthly users within the next two weeks or so.

There is a lot of hype swirling that 2011 is going to be the big comeback year for the venture-backed IPO. And we’re talking about big, gaudy IPOs, not small ones that essentially function as another funding round. And interestingly, pundits and investors expect some new $1 billion companies to debut in both cleantech and Internet sectors.

So maybe the fourth quarter was just the calm before the frenzy? Let’s hope so, because it wasn’t great, according to Dow Jones VentureSource’s quarterly liquidity report issued this morning.

Overall in 2010, the number of exits increased 25% from 2009, but considering the economic state the world was in two years ago, that’s not saying a lot. In all 514 companies went public or got acquired in 2010, netting some $39.3 billion in capital. Those totals still fell short of the 613 companies that exited 2007– the last decent year on record.

Most of 2010′s gains over 2009 happened in the first nine months of the year. In the fourth quarter specifically, 126 acquisitions and IPOs netted just under $12 billion, a small increase over the year earlier period when 123 exits netted $11 billion. Acquisitions actually fell 7% in the fourth quarter of 2010 over the fourth quarter of 2009.

But at least on a year-over-year basis the exits are getting a lot bigger. In 2010 companies returned 72% more money than the companies that exited in 2009, although at just south of $40 billion it’s about 40% less than the $69.1 billion returned to investors in 2007.

What accounts for the dramatic increase in money while the number of deals was just up 25%? The relative return of the IPO. I say “relative” because we’re still not talking about good numbers given the amount invested each quarter in new companies and the paltry track record of IPOs for most of the last decade. But for the first time since 2007, the number of IPOs actually hit double digits. Forty-six venture funded companies went public in 2010, raising $3.4 billion– up more than five times from the year earlier’s proceeds from a paltry eight IPOs. And there are 44 companies in registration, up from 25 this time last year, says Jessica Canning, director of global research for Dow Jones VentureSource.

Although most startups will exit via acquisition, IPOs are crucial. Without them, the venture-backed ecosystem doesn’t get the next generation of tech giants to do future acquisitions, and the threat of an IPO drives up the acquisition prices.

But here’s an important thing to consider amid the inevitable “HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN!” some VCs will be spinning once these numbers are released: Despite the surge of super angels and widespread belief that it takes less money and less time to build a company today, companies are taking more money and longer to go public than ever before.

According to Dow Jones, the medium amount of venture capital raised prior to an IPO rose 60% to $69 million in 2010 and the median amount of time it took a company to go public rose to more than eight years. The time to exit has been steadily marching up year-after-year, which is a combination of the economy, post-2000 changes on Wall Street, and founders’ reluctance to file. The venture-backed economy is rapidly becoming polarized between quick flips or a long, hard-fought slogs even for the hottest companies.

Even if the wildest hopes for 2011 IPOs turn out to be true, those two metrics will no doubt increase with some of the biggest contenders being decade-old startups like LinkedIn and Pandora and companies that have raised un-Godly amounts of funding like Groupon, Facebook and Zynga. It’s like David Hornik argued in our VC v. Angel smackdown last fall: Building a product is easier and cheaper than ever but building big Internet companies still takes time and a “shit-load of money.”

One final note as a hat-tip to Benchmark’s Bill Gurley: The Valley may be the biggest ecosystem, but the biggest deals still didn’t come out of Silicon Valley. The largest IPO of the year was a $211 million offering by New York-based FXCM, a foreign exchange trading firm, and the largest acquisition was a $1.2 billion purchase of Dallas-based Monitronics International, which makes security systems.

While everyone has been busy wondering when Facebook was going to IPO, most were looking past the first question: how is Facebook going to IPO? But not TechCrunch alum Evelyn Rusli and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Tonight the pair are reporting that Goldman Sachs has just led a major new investment in the social network. An investment that values it at a nice round $50 billion. And the likely reason is so Goldman can take Facebook public.

More specifically, Goldman has invested $450 million in Facebook while Russian firm (and current large stakeholder) Digital Sky Technologies threw in another $50 million for a total of $500 million in this round. But the round is more complicated than that as apparently Goldman will be able to unload some of its stake to DST, according to the report.

So is the IPO a done deal? Not exactly. While Facebook itself hasn’t given a timetable for the milestone, many were expecting it to happen in 2011. But more recent indications suggest it will more likely occur in 2012. Facebook, obviously, wants it to happen as late as possible so they don’t have shareholders to answer to. But that’s the thing; with all the investment they’ve taken, and the red-hot activity on the secondary markets, they already do have a lot of shareholders — they just don’t technically have to answer to them.

Yet.

The SEC is said to be looking into whether or not that Facebook is improperly skirting around the rules for going public.

Either way, Goldman looks to make a a good chunk of change before the IPO as well. From the report:

In a rare move, Goldman is planning to create a "special purpose vehicle" to allow its high-net worth clients to invest in Facebook, these people said. While the S.E.C. requires companies with more than 499 investors to disclose their financial results to the public, Goldman's proposed special purpose vehicle may be able get around such a rule because it would be managed by Goldman and considered just one investor, even though it could conceivably be pooling investments from thousands of clients.

If that doesn’t piss the SEC off too much, that is huge for the firm. They’ll get fees for all of that. But not drawing the further SEC attention will be hard given that Goldman is said to be trying to raise up to $1.5 billion for Facebook from investors at that $50 billion valuation.

Remember that it was barely a month ago when we reported on Accel Partners selling off a big portion of their Facebook stock at a $35 billion valuation. Of course, they made something like a 247x return on that sale, so it’s hard to argue with it. A few weeks later, we noted that Facebook had hit the $50 billion mark in valuation on the secondary markets. With this investment, that valuation has just been validated.

As if The Social Network needed any more buzz leading up to its DVD release next week… Oh and here’s a little something Facebook could use some of the money on.

[image: 20th Century Fox]

Breaking news: old school publishers seem hell-bent on insuring their content doesn’t catch on in the red-hot tablet space.

A story in the Wall Street Journal this evening details how Google, Apple, Amazon and others are all racing to try to do deals with major publishers in order to set up their “digital newsstands”. Of course, all of this has been going on for months now as the publishers seem to be aware that tablets (okay, really just the iPad so far) are actually taking off this time and they’d be wise to get on board. The problem, naturally, is that they want to be on board on their terms. And those, naturally, are old school terms. In other words, out-of-date and somewhat sleazy terms.

Here’s one main blurb of the WSJ piece:

Apple is planning to share more data about who downloads a publisher’s app, information publishers can use for marketing purposes. According to people familiar with the matter, Apple would ask consumers who subscribe to an iPad version of a magazine or newspaper for permission to share personal information about them, like their name and email address, with the publisher.

Some publishers remain unhappy with this arrangement because they think few customers would opt to share such data, according to these people.

So what the publishers seem to be demanding is that Apple opts users into sharing information without telling them. Or, to put it another way, “make it opt-out or we opt-out”. Classy.

Of course few customers would opt-in to sharing such data. Because who the hell wants to be marketed to relentlessly just because they signed up for a magazine subscription? No one. Except that’s the way the magazine subscription model currently works. Not because it’s a good model, but because in the days before technology started destroying print, people were naive enough not to realize what was going on. Obviously, the publishers would like to transition that happiness in slavery to the tablet space.

And while Apple doesn’t appear to be biting on that at this time, the publishers apparently are turing their sights towards chief rival Google. From the piece:

In recent weeks, these people say, Google has told publishers it would take a smaller slice on any sales they make of Android apps than the 30% cut Apple typically takes on iTunes sales. Google has also proposed giving publishers certain personal data about app buyers to help with marketing related products or services.

It’s not clear if in the Google scenario this would be opt-in (like Apple is proposing) or opt-out. But if Google wants to secure these deals ahead of Apple, it’s pretty clear what they’ll have to do. Hopefully they won’t do that.

Apple is also apparently on the verge of a new feature in iTunes that would allow for publishers to offer simple content subscription services. This too has been rumored for some time, and makes a lot of sense. After the initial interest wore off, it seems that most magazine apps are dwindling in sales numbers. The reason for this is obvious: they’re far too much money and too much of a pain to download. To get Time each week, you have to pay $4.99 each time. There is no subscription option. Others, like Newsweek, do have a subscription option, but it’s a bit convoluted. And others, like the Wall Street Journal, have an option (their own) that’s even more convoluted.

In order for the digital newsstand idea to work, it has to actually be a newsstand. As in, a centralized place where you can find and buy anything you’re looking for with a few easy clicks. You know, like iTunes. The stand-alone app model isn’t working for this content. But the publishers are wary of iTunes because they don’t want to give Apple the 30 percent cut, and, more importantly, they want that subscriber data.

And so we appear to be where we were a few months ago, at a stalemate. Talking to Google about a rival newsstand seems like a good bargaining tool, but the Android platform still doesn’t have a tablet that’s nearly as popular as the iPad. Amazon has the popular Kindle device, but it’s in black and white and doesn’t exactly seem like the future of magazine content consumption. You can be sure that Apple will want something like this digital newsstand in place by the launch of the iPad 2. And as they like to do, they’ll probably launch it even if they only have a few publishers on board.

And there will be some on board. Because they stand to lose a lot more than Apple does if they don’t get their content to hit on the iPad.

[image: Disney]

While much of Silicon Valley spent the last two weeks skiing or otherwise reveling in all that money made this year from acquisitions, partial liquidations and secondary deals, Square founder Jack Dorsey was apparently hard at work. TechCrunch has learned that Square is in the process of closing a large round of funding. The company is being valued, we hear from multiple sources, at somewhere close to $200 million.

We don’t have confirmation on who did it, but we hear that Sequoia Capital was in the mix to lead this round, along with previous investor Khosla Ventures, Benchmark Capital and Kleiner Perkins. Our sources say Sequoia ended up on top and will lead the round.

A strategic investor is also likely to invest, sources say. Someone like Visa, Mastercard, or American Express.

Sequoia would be a seemingly strange fit. It’s not a firm known for doing later stage deals or for paying up on valuations. But lately the firm has deviated from that playbook with deals like Evernote and Tumblr.

We hear Square’s funding was a competitive round, but have also heard that several of the top firms we expected to be in the running had some concerns about the steep valuation relative to Square’s traction, despite admiration for Dorsey and the team. Payment companies are hard to build, with fraudsters trying to exploit it and big competitors trying to run you out of the market. Square has become a media darling and has attracted an enviable team — including Keith Rabois who went through all this with PayPal– but market traction has been more elusive. It could still be a company that is so transformative it moves America’s GDP as Newsweek breathlessly anticipated a year ago, but there’s a lot of work to do first.

Still, Square is processing millions of dollars a week in transactions, and we hear they’re closing in on a million dollars a day.

This has the earmarks of one of those deal that VCs look back on in ten years and say “I told you so!”– we just don’t which side of the debate will have the bragging rights.

With eBay handling more than 2 billion U.S. product searches a quarter, the marketplace can show what items are most desirable in a given time. We recently wrote about what was trending on eBay during the holiday shopping period, and today the market place is releasing its most popular product searches in 2010.

Apple dominated the list, with the iPad and iPhone 4 taking the top two spots, respectively. These gadgets were followed by Victoria’s Secret, Nintendo Wii Games, Nintendo DS, Playstation 3, Nikon d90, diamond ring, sunglasses and laptops.

While there were some outliers in the list (i.e. Victoria’s Secret), it seems that searches on the marketplace were dominated by electronics and gadgets. The iPhone 4 actually topped eBay’s “top shopped” list, which revealed top products that consumers actually bought (as opposed to searched for) on eBay. In terms of top shopped, the iPad followed the iPhone 4 in fifth place.

Collectively, the iPhone 4 (which sold 1.6 million related products) and the iPad accounted for over 2.2 million related products sold (this includes cases, etc.).

Interestingly, neither the iPad or iPhone 4 made Amazon’s top products list this year (both are not sold on Amazon); the Kindle took the stop spot on Amazon’s list.

In what has become one of the not-so-great mysteries of technology, Facebook still hasn’t launched a native iPad application nine months after the device made its debut, despite the fact that many thousands — perhaps even millions — of people search for it every day.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped some enterprising developers from launching Facebook applications of their own — ’Friendly for Facebook’, which is made by a third-party, has become one of the App Store’s most successful applications. But that application is hardly perfect, and now it has a new challenger: Facepad, a Facebook application that has clearly taken many design cues from Twitter’s innovative iPad application, which was released in September.

The similarities are obvious, but that isn’t a bad thing. The biggest involves the way new windows are handled: just like Twitter for iPad, when you tap on a link to a piece of content Facepad will slide a new window onto the right hand side of the screen. This allows you to quickly jump to a linked article and then back to Facebook without losing your place, or between multiple friend profiles — something that isn’t so easy using a normal web browser. The application allows you to keep dozens of these tabs open at once, so you can flick across a bunch of profiles in a few seconds.

It’s pretty slick, and people seem to like it. Since launching last week, Facepad has managed to get quite a bit of organic growth. In its first twelve hours the application served over a million ad impressions — that doubled to 2 million impressions after 24 hours. Now the app is up to tens of millions of page views and is the 15th most popular application on the App Store overall.

At its core though, Facepad is still a reskinned version touch.facebook.com, the web-based version of the social network that Facebook has optimized for touchscreen displays (Friendly, another third-party app mentioned earlier, also uses touch.facebook.com as its core). This means that, aside from the handy nav bar at the left hand side and the window swiping, much of the application still feels like a regular website, which isn’t ideal.

Cofounder Cole Ratias says that will change with the launch of Facepad V2 — the team is working to make the whole application feel more like a native app, so you’ll be able to do thinks like flick through photo albums the way you would in the iPad’s default photo application. Ratias also says that the team doesn’t want to implement anything that feels half-baked — for example, he points out the chat feature in Friendly, which takes up the full screen and feels a bit clunky. Facepad will also offer chat, but not until it can present it in smaller window overlays.

Facepad is the first product from a new startup called Loytr, and the company has bigger ambitions than just becoming a better way to browse Facebook (though they’ll take that, too). In the future the company plans to integrate a gaming platform into Facepad featuring Facebook Connect-enabled, casual games that use Loytr’s APIs for monetization and other functionality (this way Loytr will be able to take a cut of revenue). The company has other plans beyond Facebook, though Ratias declined to describe them in much detail for now.

Of course, there’s little doubt that Facebook is going to be release something that’s better suited for the iPad’s large display — but based on comments from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, when it comes, it may well be based on HTML5. Zuckerberg says that Facebook doesn’t currently have enough resources to develop separate native apps for each platform, so it makes sense to make a web-based solution.

One big thing to note: the current version of Facepad has a bug that will cause it to crash on iPads that are running iOS 3.2. That’s an older version that lacks key features introduced in 4.2, like multitasking, but a significant number of users are still running it. Facepad has submitted an update that fixes the bug and is waiting on Apple to approve it.

FriendFeed. You remember it, right? It was that awesome service that Facebook acquired in August 2009. It was a smart deal all around. Facebook got an awesome team of developers and product people, while FriendFeed got to translate some of what they were doing to a service with a reach as large as any on the web. Unfortunately, it was a somewhat raw deal for many of the people who actually used FriendFeed. While the team and Facebook said it would be staying up, many users left and for most it became a ghost town.

Or did it?

There’s a hot thread on Quora right now talking about the demise of FriendFeed called: Does anyone still use Friendfeed? Why? So far, there are 29 answers, many from people in the tech community who still do use it to surface information (this is what I loved it for as well). But the best answer comes from Bret Taylor, one of the service’s co-founders, who is now the CTO for Facebook.

“US usage has decreased significantly except for a small group of devoted users (many of whom are on this thread), but the site grown quite a bit in Turkey, Italy, and Japan. Turkey is now the largest user base by a decent margin, essentially compensating for the decreased US usage. The site actually has moderately higher traffic than before to the acquisition, but it is all international usage,” Taylor writes.

A quick glance at Google Trends for Websites seems to back up this claim. While this data is never perfect, it does usually give a good overview — and sure enough, it shows that Japan and Turkey are now ahead of the U.S. in regional popularity (though it has Japan first on the list). It also shows traffic to be about the same (or slightly above) what it was around the time of the acquisition (there was a spike just prior to the event, which we knew about).

Also, our own Mike Butcher uncovered the huge Turkish usage of FriendFeed about a year ago for TechCrunch Europe. As he wrote at the time, “As well as it's fascination with Facebook, Turkish people have latched onto Microblogging in droves. But it's not Twitter they turned to first. It turns out FriendFeed is the platform of choice.”

All of this is particularly interesting since aside from keeping the servers up, the old team and Facebook have done basically no work on the service — it exists in a state of “chrysalis,” as fellow co-founder Paul Buchheit put it. But many of the features of FriendFeed, such as real-time updating, are still ahead of many other social services that attempt to do the same thing. That’s true even though Facebook has open sourced much of the technology behind it.

So here we are in a new decade, and the technologies that are now available to us continue to engage (and enthrall) in fascinating ways. The rise and collision of several trends—social, mobile, touch computing, geo, cloud—keep spitting out new products and technologies which keep propelling us forward. Below I highlight seven technologies that are ready to tip into the mainstream 2011.

Before I get into my predictions, let’s see how I did last year, when I wrote “Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010.” Some of my picks were spot on: the Tablet (hello, iPad), Geo (Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places, mobile location-aware search, etc.), Realtime Search (it became an option on Google) and Android (now even bigger than the iPhone). Some are still playing out: HTML5 (it’s made great strides, but isn’t quite here yet), Augmented Reality (lots of cool apps have AR functionality, but for the most part it is still a parlor trick), Mobile Video (FaceTime and streaming video apps pushed it forward), Mobile Transactions (Square and other transaction processing options came onto the scene), and Social CRM (Salesforce pushed Chatter, and tons of social CRM startups pushed their wares, but enterprises are always slow to adopt). And one got pushed to 2011: Chrome OS (we are still waiting).

What’s in store for 2011? Some of these themes will continue to evolve, and some new ones will gain currency. Here are seven technologies poised to rock the new year:

1. Web Video On Your TV: We’ve already seen many attempts to turn the Internet into a video-delivery pipe to rival cable TV: Google TV, Apple TV, the Boxee Box, Roku, and a slew of “Internet-enabled” TVs.  None of them are quite yet cable killers, but they are seeding the market with simple ways to bring Internet video to your large-screen TV in the living room. The more cable-quality video that becomes available over the Web via streaming services such as Netflix, Vudu, or iTunes, the more that people will turn to Web when they are looking for something to watch. This trend is not about surfing the Web on your TV. Nobody wants to do that. It is about using the Internet as an alternative way to deliver movies and TV shows to your flat-screen TV. Even the cable companies will dip their toes into the Internet delivery waters (or plunge deeper if they already have their toes wet). What looks like a pale competitor to cable today will be a lot more viable in a short, twelve months.
2. Quora Will Have Its Twitter Moment: Social Q&A site Quora may be the current darling of Silicon Valley, but not a lot of people beyond the insular tech startup world actually use it yet. That will start to change in 2011, which I believe will be the year Quora has its Twitter moment and start to really take off. Quora represents a bigger technology trend, which is the layering of an interest graph on top of people’s social graph. On Quora, you can follow not only people, but topics and questions. It defines the world by your interests, not just the people you may know or admire. This is a powerful concept and is not limited to Quora (both Twitter and Facebook also want to own the interest graph), but Quora is designed from the ground up to expose and help you explore your interests. It is addictive, and as it reaches a critical mass of early users, this will be the year it emerges from its shell much like Twitter did in 2007.
3. Mobile Social Photo Apps:The end of 2010 witnessed a spate of mobile photo apps including Instagram, PicPlz and Path. They all take advantage of several massive key trends: the growth of iPhone and Android, the ubiquity of decent cell phone cameras, GPS, and existing social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. Each of these apps is built for mobile first. They let you take a picture, mark your location, and share it with your social network (sometimes public, sometimes private). With Instagram and PicPLz, you can choose a filter to make humdrum pics look more exciting or capture a mood. By building on top of existing social networks like Twitter and Foursquare, they are making popular new ways to use those services. Instead of simply checking in, now you can do a photo checkin (even Foursquare lets you do that now). Already Instagram is one of the most popular photo apps in iTunes. Sharing photos is pretty much a universal impulse, and these apps make it easier and more fun.
4. Mobile Wallets: If you could use your cell phone as a credit card, would you? Everyone from Apple and Google to Nokia want to make that a reality and tap into the mobile payments market. Both Apple and Google are exploring this opportunity. Google bought mobile payments startup Zetawire to gain experience and the latest Android phone, the Nexus S, comes with an NFC chip—the same kind that is embedded into credit cards and lets you pay by waving it over a wireless reader. The iPhone 5 also may come equipped with an NFC chip, and Apple was sniffing around mobile payments startup BOKU last year for a possible acquisition. It is going to take more than just NFC chips in every phone to make mobile payments a reality, but efforts by the major players this year should begin to move the needle.
5. Context-Aware Apps: Whether it’s search, mobile, or social apps and services, the most useful apps people will keep coming back to are the ones which help people cut through the increasing clutter of the Internet. Apps that are aware of the context in which they are being used will serve up better filtered information. When you search on your mobile phone, that means you get local results and local offers served up first. If you are on a service like Quora that understands your interest graph, it means that you are only shown topics that you care about, sorted in realtime. If you are on a news site, you will see the most shared links from people in you follow on Twitter or are connected to on Facebook. Music and movie services will similarly surface social recommendations. In a world of information overload, context is king.
6. Open Places Database: Every mobile app, it seems, taps into the geo capabilities of phones to pinpoint your exact location and show you what is around you. (Incidentally, that is another example of a context-aware app). But there is a lot of duplication going on, with everyone from Google to Facebook to Foursquare creating their own database of places. It would make much more sense if there was an open places database that any company could both pull from and contribute to. While we are not there yet, we are making progress towards a more open places database, or at least a federated one. Factual is providing some of the data for Facebook Places and creating a places database is a major focus for the company; MapQuest (owned by AOL, as is TechCrunch) is adopting OpenStreetMaps (which could very well become the central places database with more resources and development); and Foursquare lets other apps pull from its places database through its API. There are economic reasons why some companies don’t want to participate (controlling the places database makes it easier to serve up local offers), but expect to see this movement pick up steam in 2011.
7. The Streaming Cloud: As all media moves to the cloud, more and more people will stream their movies and music whenever they want to any device. I’ve already mentioned the forces that will bring Web video streaming to your TV, but those movies and TV shows should also be available on your iPads, Android Tablets, or even mobile phones if you want. Expiring downloads will still make sense for plane trips and other places where the network is spotty, but you will manage your subscriptions and collections in the cloud. Think Netflix streaming applied to all media. If Google or Apple can convince the record companies to come along for the ride, the streaming revolution will hit music as well, with both working on jukebox-in-the-sky services. Why would you want to bother with managing all the download rights for the songs you buy from iTunes between your iPhone, iPad, laptop, and your wife’s computer, when you could just sign in form anywhere and start streaming? Plenty have tried with varying degrees of success and failure (Rhapsody, Rdio, Spotify), but it will take someone with the negotiating muscle of Apple or Google to finally bring streaming music to the masses.

What technologies do you think will make it big this year?

Photo credit: Flickr/ Pandiyan