Just before Christmas I spent a very enjoyable day at home playing with gadgets with two technology pundits. Yes, I know it doesn’t sound arduous, but it was work – we were filming a report for BBC Breakfast on the gadgets of the Noughties.

We went to some effort to assemble a collection of devices dating from around 2000 to help us illustrate how much has changed. So we had a Psion Revo, a first-generation iPod, one of those Nokia “Matrix” slider phones, and the first Canon Ixus digital camera.

To someone as old as I am, 2000 seems like yesterday, so I was amazed to find how antique these gadgets felt. The iPod was a chunky brick, with no colour screen, the camera provided two-megapixel snaps at an outlandish price and the phone seemed incapable of going online or updating my Facebook.

Mind you, the Revo still looked like a very capable mini-computer, the kind of device that might have one day evolved into a multimedia tablet. I had a series of Psion organisers and I remember making a far-sighted piece at the end of 1999 predicting that this fast-growing British firm might put the wind up Microsoft over the coming decade – well, we all make mistakes.

We asked Stuart Miles of Pocket Lint and Kat Hannaford of Gizmodo to think back to 2000 and try to remember what really excited them then about technology. Kat, who was 14 and living on a remote farm in Australia, was gripped by gaming:

“The Playstation 2 was coming out, but I had to wait a bit because it was quite expensive. And then there was the internet, which we didn’t get until later that year.”

Stuart, who was 24 and working as a technology correspondent for the Times, had just got himself an APS camera – which turned out to be an interim technology:

“Digital cameras were just starting to make their way onto the scene – 1 or 2 megapixels and very expensive – but the possibilities seemed endless.”

In the last decade, we’ve seen all sorts of technologies become obsolete as the pace of change has accelerated.

The cathode ray tube is becoming a distant memory for many as televisions have become flatter, bigger, and high definition. VHS has disappeared from most living rooms, to be replaced first by DVD, and perhaps now by Blu-Ray (though that too looks like an interim technology) and increasingly by IPTV such as the iPlayer. Big music systems with CD players and separate amplifiers are also vanishing quickly, with docks for portable players and streaming music devices popping up in many homes. And of course, more and more phones are now smartphones, with users rushing to install applications that help them run their lives or simply enjoy themselves on the move.

But, I asked my two pundits: if you had to choose a gadget of the decade, what would it be?

After a certain amount of umming and ahing, Stuart Miles came up with two:

“For me, it’s either the launch of the Canon 300D – the first sub-£1,000 digital SLR camera, or the launch of Sky+ – as it’s changed the way I watch television and freed me from the schedules.”

For Kat, though, the real advance is the advent of high-definition technology:

“It’s revolutionised all aspects of home entertainment. With the introduction of flat-screen HD TVs, the Blu-Ray format and subsequent players, and consoles like the Xbox 360 and PlayStation3 capable of playing the most brilliantly-detailed games, the quality of home viewing has changed forever.”

Well, my two gadget pundits are very knowledgeable – but I’m afraid they’re also both completely wrong. The “gadget” of the decade has to be the one thing that has made every other development possible – broadband.

We started the Noughties listening to that annoying dial-up noise as we connected to the net at 56kbps; we ended it with nearly three quarters of British homes enjoying a permanent connection at up to 50Mbps, and increasing numbers able to enjoy mobile broadband at speeds home users would have killed for in 2000. We may moan about unsatisfactory broadband services, and look enviously at countries like South Korea – but living in a connected world became a reality in the Noughties.

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The call with news of a deal in the technology sector came mid-afternoon on 30 December, a day when much more important news was breaking, so I realise that the sale of Spinvox to Nuance may not attract a lot of attention. But it brings to an end the remarkable and rather sad story of what seemed to be one of Britain’s most promising young technology businesses.

At the beginning of 2009, Spinvox was apparently riding high, winning awards for its ground-breaking voice recognition technology, recruiting some of the brightest and best in the telecoms and marketing industries, and signing big contracts with the world’s leading telecoms operators. But behind the scenes, it was wrestling with huge issues surrounding both its technology and its finances – issues that we revealed on this site in July (see here, here and here).

Now a company that had raised well over $200m from blue-riband backers like Goldman Sachs and Carphone Warehouse has been sold for $102.5m (around £64m) and about a third of that in Nuance shares rather than cash. The Nuance press release unveiling the deal makes no mention of the company’s founders Christina Domecq and Daniel Doulton, and in fact features no quote from anyone at Spinvox – highly unusual in this kind of announcement. So the deal raises a number of questions, which I’ve put to both Nuance and to Spinvox

(1) Will the backers get their money back?

Neither company was at all forthcoming on this issue; but bearing in mind that a £30m loan – due before Christmas – needs to be repaid, it appears there’s little left for the investors. Those who were in at the start – like Carphone Warehouse – may have written off their stakes already. As for Christina Domecq, who at one stage had the biggest stake: hers were ordinary shares, so will rank behind those of investors who came in with refinancing late in the day.

(2) What happens to Christina Domecq and Daniel Doulton?

The chief executive Christina Domecq – and to a lesser extent her co-founder Daniel Doulton – were highly-visible standard-bearers for the company until this summer, since when they have disappeared entirely from view. So will either or both stay on? “We’re talking to them… a lot of knowledge, a lot of history, a lot of capability in those folks,” was what Rich Green of Nuance told me about the founders, but he would go no further.

(3) Will the staff, and in particular the Cambridge Speech Lab, be retained by Nuance?

Again, Mr Green was complimentary about the skills of the Spinvox staff and in particular about its Advanced Speech Group at Cambridge headed by Dr Tony Robinson. “Spinvox has a lot of great people, Cambridge is part of the value of what we’re acquiring.” But he could not give any details of who would be retained by Nuance, explaining that there would be an “integration process” over the coming weeks. One former employee tells me that a number of current staff are planning to hand in their notice on Monday, in the expectation that they have no future with the company.

(4) Why is Nuance doing this deal?

Nuance told me back in the summer that Spinvox had no technology that it didn’t have already. And this afternoon, Rich Green repeated that: “Nuance voice-to-text technology is second to none.” So why on Earth is it buying Spinvox? Surely it’s the chance to take over those contracts with global telecoms firms? “The contracts and global coverage are part of it,” he granted, and went on to explain that Spinvox brought a lot of operational expertise to the party. That expertise, of course, extends to the operation of call-centres around the world, and it’s not entirely clear how many of them will be retained by Nuance. But at just over $100m, the deal may seem to the American company a reasonably cheap way of reinforcing its position as a leading speech-recognition firm while being introduced to some big potential customers.

So the curtain may have fallen on the Spinvox saga – but there are still plenty of questions left unanswered.

Update 1350, 31 December: The data question

Last night, I was contacted by someone who pointed out that I’d omitted one key question: what happens to Spinvox’s data?

I’m told by a reliable source that over 100 million voicemail messages dating back to 2006 – both the audio and the transcribed text – are still stored by Spinvox, amounting to 100 terabytes. It’s a very valuable resource – so much so that I’m told that a major search engine company was also looking at buying the business in recent months, making it clear that it was interested only in the data – not in the technology.

Now a spokesman for Spinvox has confirmed to me that all of that data will simply be handed over to Nuance as part of the deal.

There are obvious privacy issues here: did Spinvox users realise when they signed up that their private messages might be stored for years, then handed over to an American company?

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In Las Vegas next week, a twenty-five year journey could come to a successful conclusion, when a British company launches what it believes will be a triumphant combination of science and technology. Plastic Logic’s e-reader, the Que, will be unveiled on the opening morning of the Consumer Electronics Show. It could be one of the show’s stand-out products – or it could end up buried under an avalanche of hype about a forthcoming rival device from a better-known firm.

This journey began in the 1980s at Cambridge University’s world-renowned Cavendish laboratory, where the physicist Richard Friend was working on carbon-based materials for semi-conductors. He tried and failed to get electronics companies interested in the plastic light-emitting diodes which emerged from his research – but when he teamed up with another Cambridge lecturer Henning Sirringhaus, they ended up finding ways to print transistors onto plastic. It was this work which led to the development of the light, flexible displays which Plastic Logic believes will revolutionise the way we read.

On a snowy day just before Christmas, I went to meet the two men at Plastic Logic’s offices on the Cambridge Science Park. They are both still teaching at the university, while keeping an eye on the progress of the firm they founded in 2000. And while it has taken a decade for Plastic Logic to bring its first product to market, Sir Richard – he was knighted in 2003 – was confident that the long wait would be worthwhile:

“The most impressive thing is it’s an integration of fundamental science and world-leading engineering – it’s the thing that the British are not supposed to be able to do.”

At that stage, they were not able to show me the final product, but I was allowed to handle prototype displays developed in Cambridge and then manufactured at their plant in Dresden.

They are light and flexible, and Professor Sirringhaus told me the aim was to provide the same experience you get from paper, rather than the one you get from the glass which is needed for conventional screens:

“The whole reading experience is about holding something that is unbreakable.
“It’s light; you can treat it like paper; you can stuff it in your briefcase. If you want to read a business document or paper, then the weight of the glass used in conventional technology is quite significant.”

Plastic Logic has signed deals with a number of major newspaper groups, including the Financial Times and USA Today, to make their titles available each day on the Que e-reader. The product, which will enter a fast-growing market dominated by products like the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader, will be aimed principally at the business market. While the technology would permit a roll-up screen, it seems they’ve gone for something more conventional, so the Que may not look that different from e-readers with a glass screen.

The other crucial figure in the story of Plastic Logic is Herman Hauser, the scientist and venture capitalist who’s been involved in many of the ground-breaking businesses to emerge from Cambridge over the last two decades – you may have caught him in Micro Men, BBC4′s recent drama about the rivalry between Sinclair and Acorn Computers. He put up the money back in 2000 which allowed Friend and Sirringhaus to form Plastic Logic, and he’s been instrumental in raising more finance as the years have gone by.

What’s really amazing about this business is that that it has gone all the way from research in a laboratory, to manufacturing a product, to building a global sales and marketing team – much of that operation is now based in California – without sacrificing its independence. Which might just be a mistake. A less courageous option would have been to license its technology to Amazon or Sony – or maybe Apple – and let them use their undoubted marketing expertise to sell the idea of plastic displays to the world.

There are now convincing reports that Apple has an event scheduled for late January where it will unveil a mystery new product. The blogs and fan sites are alive with feverish speculation about the iSlate – supposedly the name of a tablet computer which will provide everything from books, TV programmes and music to the solution to global warming.

I’m as fascinated as anyone to see what Apple really has been hiding up Steve Jobs’ sleeve, but I hope that amid all the hullabaloo, the launch of Plastic Logic’s Que next Thursday will not be overlooked. I will be in the United States to cover this and a number of other technology stories next week, when this blog will have a new look and a new name. So thanks for listening in 2009 – and see you next year.

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As I hinted at in my previous post, Maggie Shiels and I will spend 2010 each with our own blog – closely linked, of course. You can start reading dot.Rory now, with a post from San Francisco, and Maggie will start posting at dot.Maggie tomorrow. For those of you comfortable with RSS feeds, here is mine, and here is Maggie’s.

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As the year draws to a close, I’ve been looking back at some of the stories I’ve covered here, and trying to work out what 2009 really told us about technology. It’s been a year which has seen Windows, Mac and Linux users all getting to play with new operating systems. It’s seen the mobile web really come into its own, and more and more of us have been entrusting our data to the cloud. But above all, it’s been the year of the social web, with billions of people finding new ways to communicate everything from their campaign to make Rage Against the Machine the Christmas number one, to their fury at repression in Iran. Here are a few of my highlights:

January: Tech gloom, and a classic Twitter picture

The year began with the technology world apparently deep in gloom, with Sony, Microsoft and Nokia all unveiling some dreadful results. Mind you, one company, Apple defied the recession, with sales and profits continuing to soar. Its share price however was depressed by the confirmation that its presiding genius Steve Jobs was in poor health.

This was also the month when an aircraft made a crash landing on New York’s Hudson river – and a spectator Janis Krum used his phone to upload a picture to Twitter, confirming the arrival of the micro-blogging platform

February: Spotify blooms, MySpace fades

This month I asked whether Spotify would change the music business. Suddenly the free ad-supported music-service was the hottest young technology business in Europe, with a whole industry hoping that its arrival signalled the moment that consumers tired of illegal downloads. Spotify has continued to blossom – though profits still seem a distant prospect – but there’s not much evidence yet that music piracy is dying.

One former web star in less than rude health was MySpace. When I met its founder Chris DeWolfe at Mobile World Congress he insisted that the social network had not lost the cool factor, despite being overtaken by Facebook. But a few months later he was gone as MySpace’s owner Rupert Murdoch decided to “unfriend him” in his campaign to turn round a fading business.

March: Google up your street

One company seemed to provide a technology story just about every week this year. In March the big Google news was the arrival of Streetview in the UK. The search giant thought there’d be a universal welcome for a service that allowed you to roam the streets of British cities and spot that the people who’d bought your old house had repainted the front door in an ugly shade of green.

It was hugely popular – but there was soon a backlash from those who felt their privacy was being invaded. In Broughton near Milton Keynes the locals stopped a Streetview car and sent it on its way out of their village. A metaphor, perhaps, for the growing resistance to the power of Google in all sorts of spheres.

April: Making web video pay

This was also the year of web video, when millions discovered that the internet was now the quickest and cheapest way to get access to moving pictures of just about anything interesting.

So, another Google product, YouTube, was the place where more than 100 million went to see the most unlikely new celebrity of 2009, Susan Boyle. ITV’s “Britain’s Got Talent” discovered the singer from West Lothian but YouTube turned her into a global phenomenon.

The first pictures of Ian Tomlinson being pushed to the ground by police at a G20 protest – he died shortly afterwards – appeared on the Guardian’s website, and newspapers big and small ramped up their video offerings in search of a new business model.

Getting huge audiences for online video was easy, making money from them has proved a lot more difficult. although YouTube now claims that it’s earning substantial amounts from advertising around its video clips.

May: The culture of copying

Throughout this year the debate about illegal file-sharing and what should be done about it raged back and forth, with the government’s Digital Britain report the focus for some furious lobbying by the media industry and internet service providers.

In May a report by a body, The Strategic Advisory Board on Intellectual Property, was slammed by what you might term the file-sharing lobby for including some questionable figures about the impact of web piracy on the music industry. But its description of Britain’s copying culture and warning against trying to criminalise the seven million people who were members of this “downloading community” now looks prescient. After all, the Digital Economy bill, with its measures against persistent file-sharers, hasn’t won universal support – particularly from the ISPs who may have to enforce the new law.

June: Iran and the internet

Each time unrest breaks out in countries whose governments are uncomfortable with complete freedom of expression, we now see protesters looking to the web and mobile phones as tools of dissent. So it was after the disputed elections in Iran. It seemed at first that the opposition was winning the digital battle, using mobile phones to record police brutality and organising marches and distributing news via Facebook and Twitter. But the government learned quickly how to silence – or at least quieten – these channels of protest. And while events in Iran were of intense interest to the outside world in June, the attention span of the digerati is not much longer than a tweet. While the online protests continued, the Twitterverse moved on to new topics – such as Tiger Woods or that boy in the escaping hot air balloon.

July: The spinning of Spinvox

In the middle of July I received information that one of Britain’s brightest young tech start-up companies was not quite what it claimed to be. Spinvox, which converts voicemails into text, was carrying out most of that job using a string of call-centres around the world rather than the advanced speech recognition technology of which it boasts. This was proving an expensive way of transcribing messages and had implications for the company’s privacy standards and for its finances – in July it had asked its staff to take some of their pay in the form of stock options to help it through to profitability.

The company described the allegations as “a veritable maelstrom of accusations, misapprehensions and sometimes just plain lies” – we stood by our story. As I write, Spinvox is on the verge of a sale to an American speech recognition firm. It remains to be seen whether the investors who backed it with over £100m will see much of their money back.

August: Does Mandelson “get” the internet?

Over the summer Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report, published in June, was being transformed into a bill that was supposed to shape Britain’s future as a digital economy. And by late August it was becoming clear that the media industry bosses who had been somewhat disappointed with Stephen Carter’s anti-file-sharing measures were having more luck with Lord Mandelson. As the plan emerged for a “nuclear option” – temporarily disconnecting persistent offenders – one Labour politician muttered “Peter doesn’t get the internet”. The media barons disagreed – at last someone was taking seriously the huge threat posed to Britain’s creative industries by the culture of free.

September: Water or the web

Until this summer one part of the world was left stranded by the digital revolution, without a reliable and affordable connection to the internet. Then the first of a series of cables landed on the East African coast, bringing broadband from across the Indian ocean. We travelled to Kenya and Rwanda to report on Connected Africa, and found inspiring stories of the hope behind the hype. In Kenya, farmers without running water or electric power told us they wanted to get online so they could market their crops abroad. In Rwanda, a nation still recovering from a traumatic recent history was betting that the fast internet could lift it out of poverty.

October: Ubuntu and the OS wars

This was the month when I found out just how passionately many people feel about a subject that leaves millions cold -the nature of their computer operating system. After trying out Windows 7 for a week, I gave Ubuntu’s Karmic Koala just 24 hours. While I found the latest version of this Linux operating system simple and pleasant to use, my failure to fall in love with it – or to spend as much time with it as Windows – provoked rage amongst its supporters, and brought a record number of comments to this blog. I said I would give it a longer trial, and while that’s not been possible to date, I am hoping to fulfil that promise in the near future. But did we at the BBC give Ubuntu a fair crack of the whip, in relation to its overall share of the operating system market? Absolutely – name me another mainstream media outlet which gave it more prominent coverage this year.

November: Murdoch v Google

Throughout the year the grumbling from old media about the internet has grown more persistent, with the web blamed for destroying the economics of content production and promoting the idea that everything from music to movies to news should be free. Rupert Murdoch has led the chorus, with Google his main target – he feels the search giant feeds off the content of his newspaper empire without paying for its meals.

In November reports suggested a possible deal between Murdoch’s News Corp and Microsoft’s Bing to give that search engine preferential access to news, shutting out Google.

In this titanic battle between old and new media barons, it then appeared that Google had blinked, by making it just slightly more difficult for readers to find a chink in newspaper paywalls. But this battle has far to go, and in 2010 we will learn exactly how Rupert Murdoch plans to persuade readers that online journalism is worth paying for.

December: Facebook offends some friends

The year ended with another story about the social web. Facebook has perhaps been the outstanding new media success story of 2009, growing its audience to over 350 million people worldwide. But it still appears nervous about the impact of a much smaller social network Twitter, and the changes it made to its privacy settings, encouraging its users to share more information with the world, seemed to reflect that. There has been a backlash, with privacy groups claiming that users had not signed up to a network where so much would be visible, and some teachers fearing that their schools would now force them to leave Facebook. But we’ve seen rows like this before, and Mark Zuckerberg’s company has just kept on growing.

Will 2010 prove to be the year Facebook floats on the stock markets, and starts making some serious money? The sceptics say it’s an ephemeral business, which can never turn millions of users into billions of dollars. But that’s what they said about Google back in 2004.

So, a very social year, and as it draws to a close, let me wish all our readers a very Happy Christmas. Whatever your operating system – or your social network – I hope you’ll stay on our friends list in 2010.

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Readers of “mommy blogger” Shellie Ross are used to her sharing information about her life through her blog and also through her Twitter stream.

No-one, however, expected a tweet she sent out on Monday that has sparked a storm of protest, criticism, headlines and sympathy. Here is why.

At 17:22 local time from her home in Florida, Ms Ross tweeted that:

“Fog is rolling in thick scared the birds back in the coop.”

Eleven minutes later, her son called 911 to report that his two-year-old brother Bryson was floating unconscious in the pool.

The paramedics arrived at the house at 17:38.

At 18:12, Ms Ross tweeted again:

“Please pray like never before, my 2 yr old fell in the pool.”

Tragically, five hours later her son Bryson was declared dead. At 23:08 Ms Ross returned to her Twitter account to update her 5,400-plus followers. “Remembering my million dollar baby.” She also included a photo of Bryson in the post.

The case has now fuelled a debate about parenting and of course about how much someone should share about something so personal. There are equal amounts of shock, sympathy and anger about the affair.

And naturally enough, much of it is being conducted over the internet, especially through Twitter and a number of blogs.

Ms Ross tried defending her actions by answering her critics via Twitter but has since made her Twitter account private – no doubt given all the media attention the case has attracted.

One mommy blogger who has been vocal in her view of how Ms Ross conducted herself is Madison McGraw. She wrote on her blog:

“Maybe if she (Ms Ross) wasn’t tweeting, her son might still be alive.”

As well as critics, Ms Ross has had supporters speak out on her behalf.

Those who know her called her a devoted mum. One friend told Florida Today that “blogging is a community” and that asking Twitter followers to pray was not unlike asking a congregation to pray.

Rebecca Phillips of the spirituality website Beliefnet.com agreed.

“If you believe in the power of prayer and have an urgent situation like this mother did, you want as many people praying as possible. She probably felt very helpless.”

Ms Ross has hit out at the opprobrium being heaped upon her by using her blog. She especially takes a swipe at the media.

“If it were not for you, I could mourn in peace. Let’s try this why don’t we, leave me alone, find your next victim and let my son’s memory be one of good and peace and strength.”

While Ms Ross and her family deal with a terrible loss, the question is being asked about how much one really should share with the rest of the online world.

Another issue is how much support one can get online when something this devastating happens.

Is this case an example of the power of social media or its misuse?

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I know how much some of you hate stories that mention a certain microblogging service – but Twitter is the source of two interesting stories today.

First of all, it disappeared for about an hour at around 06:00, with the website and Twitter applications both failing to function.

Screenshots on some blogs appear to indicate that Iranian hackers – angered by Twitter’s supposed role in fomenting opposition in that country – took the site down.

If so, it’s a powerful demonstration that social networks are becoming an important battleground, both for liberation movements and for their opponents.

And there’s another story rather closer to home. As snow sweeps across Eastern England, Twitter is once again a useful place to find information – as long as it doesn’t crack under the pressure.

But amid the steady stream of tweets about snow depths and road conditions, a row has broken out over something rather peculiar – just who owns the UK snow?

Or rather who owns #uksnow, the “hashtag” used by twitterers to identify and find tweets about this subject.

Back in February, when the snow was so heavy it even kept hardy London children from school, an inventive web developer called Ben Marsh saw all the #uksnow tweets and had an idea. Using their postcodes, he plotted them all on a map giving a real-time picture of what was going on.

Yesterday he resurrected the idea with a new map, which you can find here.

I had already said on Twitter that I was planning a trip to Cambridge today, and Ben kindly sent me a message drawing my attention to his map. But minutes later. I was getting a message from another twitterer, Julian Bray.

First, he advised me to “forget cambridge a whole snow dump tonight” then went on “ps I invented the #uk snow hashtag last year and March(sic) hijacked it! ie my intell.prop.”

It seems that Mr Bray is cross that his “invention” of #uksnow has been forgotten, with all the recognition going to Ben Marsh. I think it’s the first time that anyone has claimed intellectual property rights to a hashtag.

All sorts of possibilities open up – after all, popular hashtags can be used millions of times, so maybe I should now create #hashtagdispute, assert my IP rights, and demand payment every time it is used.

All very interesting – but perhaps less important than the apparent cyber-warfare between Iran’s government, the opposition and Twitter.

Social networks are transforming the way we communicate; they’re also becoming the place where we fight – over issues big and small.

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