Posts tagged Stories

This year was another huge one for the Web and the companies, technologies and individuals that make things happen on it. We saw groundbreaking new devices unveiled, key companies go public, a few tech fumbles and we lost some visionaries.

Narrowing down the ten biggest Web news stories of 2011 was no easy task. Lots of stories had a massive impact. Some of them fit into a larger, ongoing trend, while many are singular, important events. Some stories broke to extensive attention and fanfare, only to see their significance fizzle out within a few weeks. We’ve painstakingly whittled down ten of the biggest stories of the year and rounded them up for you here.

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1. The Death of Steve Jobs

The biggest story in tech this year was also one of the biggest news stories around the globe, period. The death of Steve Jobs sparked a worldwide outpouring of grief not just because he was the cofounder and CEO of one of the world’s most beloved and successful companies, but also because his life was cut short at a time when he was nowhere near finished making his impact.

Walter Isaacson’s official biography describes a frail and dying Jobs being actively involved in the development of the iPhone 4S and talking about about his next big idea: an Apple-branded television set, something that is expected to launch sometime next year.

Here on ReadWriteWeb we looked at Jobs’s legacy in a historical context, examined his impact on user experience and design and looked at his unique approach to business and why it was so effective. Our own Scott M. Fulton III turned back the clock to the early days of Apple and took a detailed look at what Jobs meant back then. No look back at the life of a powerful and famous person would be fair or complete without an honest look at some of the less noble aspects of their legacy and even some of the business mistakes they made along the way.

In a way, Jobs was with us for the remainder of the year. Just over a year after Jobs was criticized for refusing to support Flash on the iPad other iOS devices, Adobe announced that they were abandoning the development of mobile Flash all together.

A week after his death, it was announced that the iPhone 4S had broken Apple’s records by selling over 1 million units in its first 24 hours on the market. It won’t be the last product we’ll see that Jobs had a direct hand in developing, either. The iPhone 5, iPad 3 and rumored Apple television set are all expected to launch next year, undoubtedly with a little piece of Jobs’ legacy built right in.

2. Web-Fueled Global Unrest

The year 2011 started with the fall of a dictator, and ended with several more deposed and more than one global protest movement in full bloom. From the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots, the headlines in 2011 were packed with social media-fueled unrest.

Following January’s revolution in Tunisia, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was overthrown after a massive rebellion that was originally organized on Facebook and that fueled in large part by the Web and social networking sites. The sentiment spread to Libya, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain with smaller movements springing up in Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon and elsewhere. As 2011 comes to a close, the Arab Spring is still well underway and shows no sign of letting up, even in the face of violent and repressive reactions from governments across the Middle East and North Africa.

Borrowing a page from the book of Middle Eastern protestors, activists at the Canadian magazine Adbusters put out a call for Americans to launch their own protests against the excesses of Wall Street, income inequality and the forces that caused the U.S. financial meltdown and subsequent recession. Across the country, copycat “Occupy” protests sprung up in solidarity, with many of them turning violent.

The Occupy protests, which are sometimes criticized for lacking clear goals and strategies, have relied heavily on social media both as an organizational tool and for getting the attention of the news media. After being uprooted by police in many major cities, the Occupy movement is gearing up to enter its second phase. We suspect we’ll continue to hear about it well into 2012, in newspapers, magazines, blogs and tweets.

3. Launch of the iPhone 5 / iPhone 4S

For most of 2011, Apple fans eagerly awaited something everybody was referring to as the iPhone 5. Everyone, that is, except for Apple, who on October 4 launched the iPhone 4S. The device was not the “completely redesigned” handset most were anticipating, and many expressed their disappointment online, but that didn’t stop the new gadget from breaking Apple’s own first-day sales records.

Year-long curiosity about Apple’s next smartphone made “iPhone 5″ fastest-rising searches on Google in 2011. When it finally launched, the device turned out a be a more modest iteration in the iPhone product line. Most of its specs are not especially noteworthy for a new phone. It has a faster processor and better-quality camera, both standard additions to a next generation device such as this.

The real value of the iPhone 4S was in part just an extension of the overall impact the iPhone has had on the smartphone market. This year we got a better one and Apple proved that it can still make people stand in line for these gadgets, even if its not the dramatic overhaul everybody wanted.

Around the same time as the iPhone launch, we got iOS 5, one of the biggest upgrades to Apple’s mobile operating system yet. The new version of iOS features a redesigned notification system, cloud-based wireless syncing of content and apps, a digital newsstand and much else.

In terms of features, the biggest thing the 4S brought to the table was Siri. The military-grade voice-activated search and “personal assistant” feature has wowed consumers, inspired parodies and given developers a new technology to hack. Siri’s broader impact on search and how far hackers will be able to push its boundaries are both yet to be seen.

What’s clear now is that voice controlled mobile computing got its mass market debut this year and we’ve only seen the beginning of what it can do.

4. Amazon Launches The Kindle Fire and Silk

Rumors that Amazon would be launching its own tablet device swirled for a good portion of the year. Leaked details from suppliers and analyst predictions all pointed to the launch of some kind of iPad competitor. The story was all but confirmed when Techcrunch got a hands-on sneak preview of the device.

In September, Amazon launched the Kindle Fire, a 7-inch, $200 Android-based tablet geared toward reading, watching video and gaming. The gadget was far from being an iPad killer, as it was small, lacked a camera, had no accelerometer and fell short on other hardware specs. But that was beside the point. Amazon made a rather decent media tablet available at less than half the cost of the iPad.

The product’s first iteration may have its shortcomings, but it’s good enough to open up the tablet market to a whole new category of consumers. If its early success continues into early 2012, Apple may be forced to rethink that longstanding $500 price tag when they release the iPad 3 next year.

One feature of the Kindle Fire turned into a story all its own. Silk, its proprietary Web browser, uses Amazon’s cloud infrastructure to lift some of the burden of loading pages off of the device itself and can even predict browsing habits. Early tests indicate that “cloud acceleration” may actually be slower than normal browsing, and some privacy concerns have been raised about the way Silk works. Amazon has assuaged many of those concerns already and we imagine performance will improve once the product gets past version 1.0.

5. Stop Online Piracy Act + Protect IP Act

By the end of 2011, the United States Congress had two very controversial pieces of legislation about the Internet making their way through the sausage-making process. The Stop Online Piracy Act (in the House) and the Protect IP Act (in the Senate) are both geared toward doing what their names suggest. However, the scope of power the laws would give to media conglomerates and law enforcement to shut off access to foreign websites is what has many in the Internet industry up in arms.

In short, SOPA and PIPA would allow copyright holders to ask ISPs to block access to any foreign-based website that is deemed to be illegally hosting copyrighted material. It would also force the hand of search engines, ad networks and payment processors to cut off ties with any such site.

The debate over the proposed legislation has pitted the music and big media industries against some of the biggest names in Web technology. The RIAA has lashed out at Google for opposing SOPA, while the lone tech company on the list of supporters, GoDaddy, saw a major backlash among tech influencers and consumers. This reaction ultimately led to their abandoning outright support for the bill altogether.

The saga is far from over. The next hearing on the matter has been postponed until after the new year, so expect the SOPA controversy to heat right back up in a few weeks, if it even manages to die down in the meantime.

Next Page:Google Goes Social, a Failed Merger and the Year’s Biggest Privacy Scandal