For web technology, 2011 was a year of great growth and change. 2012 will, no doubt, call for more updates and new functionality. Let’s take a moment to look back at some of the notable web technology events of 2011.

1. January 1 – Instagram, a popular photo-sharing iPhone app, has an average of 3 photos uploaded per second. By the end of 2011, that number rises to 60 per second, and President Barack Obama gets an account.
2. Feb 11 – President Hosni Mubarak steps down after the uprising of the Egyptian people, who used social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to organize and broadcast parts of the revolution.
3. April 29 – Prince WIlliam marries Kate Middleton. Twitter records 227 tweets per second during the event. Even some celebs, including Katy Perry, were tweeting.
4. July 12 – Netflix announces a change in plan prices – it will now cost more for customers to keep both the streaming and DVDs by mail functionalities.
5. September 20 – Google+ is rolled out to the public. By the end of 2011, it has more than 62 million users.
6. October 4 – The iPhone 4S is released. The new version features Siri, a personal assistant application that allows a person to use voice to send messages, make phone calls, schedule meetings, and more.
7. October 5 – Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, dies, and the Apple community mourns. Apple creates a “Remembering Steve Jobs” page.
8. November 14 – Amazon launches Kindle fire, which has its own web browser, Amazon Silk.
9. December 7 – Facebook releases Timeline, its new profile design.
10. December 29 – After first supporting SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, the popular Web hosting company, GoDaddy, decides to oppose it after losing tens of thousands of domains.

The new iPhone Applications are now available and they can be acquired from the comfort of your lazyboy.

* The new iPhone 2.0 software is supposed to be out later today

I read about it a while ago, but just recently made the purchase. The Nike+iPod Sport Kit.

For around $30 your runs can be monitored (pace, distance, calories burned) and you can turn on a voice to chime in each mile, provide motivational comments or simply announce your pace and milage with the push of a button. This of course is overlayed upon the killer mix you have created or downloaded as your ipod playlist.

After the run, simply plug in your ipod and it uploads your run data to a very slick nike web application – a beautifully designed web site application. Here you get graphs of your run and a plethora of other very cool options like:

Download ipod playlists of others’ workout mixes (Sport Imixes)
Find running routes that others in your area have mapped, and add your own
Create running groups or teams (and compete!)
Create a training schedule
Create goals and competitions (for yourself or you and others)
Get interactive coaching/workouts

And much more. I am only 2 weeks into it but I have never been so motivated to stay on track with my workout, and to continue to improve my pace with every run. Tonight, Lance Armstrong even chimed in at the end of my run to congratulate me on setting my personal best pace per mile.

In all, I see it as the perfect blend of human and computer interaction. The design of the hardware, the user experience, graphical interface and feature set, the personal and community aspects are all exceptional.

Best of all my wife can’t give me a hard time for sitting down at the computer after getting the kids to bed. Just uploading my workout hon’!

Now gift-givers have another opportunity to give the gift of clean teeth. The latest toothbrush technology has evolved to the point where toothpaste may no longer be necessary. The Soladey Titanium Toothbrush runs on saliva, light, and a titanium core.

Here’s a description of how it works from Soladey.com:

Soladey looks like an ordinary toothbrush, but closer examination reveals a titanium (metal) ionic conducting rod, which runs through the replaceable bristle head and into the handle. This rod is the secret to Soladey. It’s made of a patented solar conducting material that allows light, by photoelectric activity, to be converted into a natural energy source which kills the harmful bacteria in your mouth.

The downside? You have to shove a light bulb in your mouth in order to activate the cleaning process. And make sure you have plenty of spit.

If you’re into marketing, compare the Australian Soladey site with the US version. In America, nothing encourages good hygiene like a bodacious babe weilding titanium toothbrushes.

Star identification is undoubtedly astronomically more difficult than decoding the minute variations of LBJs. There are billions upon billions of stars, and unless you have access to the Giant Magellan Telescope, they’re going to look pretty darn similar to one another.

There is no longer a need to be intimidated by the million twinkling lights in the sky. The new Meade MySKY Sky Navigator is a silvery-gray gun-like apparatus with Nintendo-esque red buttons that you can point and shoot at the sky to learn about the cosmos.

It’s not a telescope; it’s a GPS system and database. You can hook it up to Meade’s computerized telescopes to have your telescope automatically align to where you point your star gun.

I would have loved this gift when I was a young’un. If you really loved your star-loving kid, you’d buy it — just don’t look at the price tag.

If I did more presentations, or had a reason to use mac’s “front row” tool more I would definetely scrap my apple issued remote and get one of these. Maybe when I get my Apple TV

SiK Remote

Post-worthy simply because its a great design – why didn’t apple think of this?