The 13th year of the third millennium AD is nearly upon us. Barring any Mayan apocalypse, it will be rung in as every year for the past hundred and eight, with a lighted disco ball dropping over Times Square and fireworks around the world.

The outlook for the tech and Web industries is much murkier. Who will emerge with a surprise hit? Who will stumble and fall? Will the Ouya actually be released?

Seriously, though, 2013 is poised to be an unusually active year, especially in mobile, with RIM BlackBerry 10 and Mozilla Firefox OS due out, and flagship smartphones from Amazon and Microsoft looking increasingly likely. For once Apple might not be the most exciting company*.

Here are some of my (completely speculative) predictions:

1. Microsoft launches Skype Video, a video-sharing website/social network to compete with YouTube and Google Hangouts under the Skype brand.

2. Google...

We are, any of us who post photos online anyway, laying the groundwork for a fully navigable, virtual copy of the entire physical world.

The combination of vast, ever-updating databases of digital photography on social networks, along with increasingly accurate digital maps, has already resulted in a few prototypes of “Matrix”-like systems by large tech companies (read below for more of these).

But it’s critical to keep in mind that amateur photographers are generating most of the photos these days (not pros or tech company employees or contractors), so the imagery is both more raw, random and revealing. Social media has become the dominant repository for those photos, meaning most new photos are readily publicly accessible. Now all we need is for someone to come along and develop the program that will scrape publicly posted photographic imagery on social networks and compile the...

Cover of the movie “Cannibal Holocaust,” via the blog Invasion Of the B-Movies

After Apple unveiled the iPad Mini, the immediate discussion around the Web centered not around the device’s 7.9-inch form factor or new features (or lack thereof) or look or feel or any of the chatter that usually accompanies an Apple product launch. Instead, the discussion was about price: $329 to start, 65 percent more than the most obvious competition, the Amazon Kindle Fire HD and the Google Nexus 7. Compared to these devices, many deemed the iPad Mini too expensive.

The disparity was in fact, so glaring, that Apple executives repeatedly defended the pricing during and following the product’s announcement event on October 23.

“Others have tried to make tablets smaller than the iPad and they’ve failed miserably,” said Apple SVP of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller before comparing the iPad Mini...

As Facebook gathers its billionth user and beyond, it’s worth taking a look at what’s going on with its other pet project: Instagram.

A few days before Facebook made the one billion user announcement, my friend (lower case “f”) posted an Instagram photo to Facebook.

I wasn’t following him on Instagram, but when clicked through to his photo on the Instagram desktop website, I noticed I could begin following him on Instagram directly from there, as opposed to having to go into the iPhone app and search for his username.

It works for other users too.

The Instagram website, which used to be little more than a blog for the company and a mirror to the iPhone app, has steadily improved over the course of 2012, especially over the last few months.

It looks like Instagram added this follow-from-Web and other features – the ability to “Like” a post from the desktop site and comment...

Facebook has a new IRL physical gift purchasing option, “Facebook Gifts,” which the company opened on Sept. 27 (although the surprise had been spoiled early by The Next Web).

The short of it is that Facebook users (American ones only for now) can now click on a tiny giftwrapped present icon in their Friends’ birthday alerts or on above a Friend’s wall posts and pick from a list of stuff, mostly Valentine-y type stuff including cupcakes, chocolates, flowers, teddy bears and stuffed Angry Birds toys and also clothing and pay for it directly on the site with their credit cards. The Friend-cum-recipient of the gift then gets an alert saying they’ve been Gifted and have to enter in their shipping address and then someone mails them the gift.

Aside from the fact that this puts Facebook squarely into e-commerce and nearer to all-out competition with Amazon and eBay, and aside from the...

MySpace isn’t going quietly into the night. The most popular social network of the early-to-mid 2000s, now down a few million users and newly commandeered by Justin Timberlake and a company called Specific Media, dropped a video preview of its eye-catching redesign on Monday, causing people to actually talk about MySpace again (though notably on MySpace’s usurpers Facebook and Twitter).

The redesign – which eschews MySpace’s older standardized “headshot” profile layout as well as its later funkier redesigns – was immediately compared to numerous other sites and products of the moment; Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, even Windows 8 and Google Plus.

While some of these comparisons are more accurate than others from a design standpoint (Tumblr and Pinterest, namely), the truth is, all that matters in the new video is that it showed MySpace’s renewed focus on being a platform for music...

Apple made a dumb move. What could be its dumbest yet.

Yes, the initial furor over the inaccuracy and sloppiness of Apple Maps has arguably more to do with how uncharacteristic it is for Apple, a company that’s done seemingly everything right in computing over the past 10 years, to mess up. It’s as though the bright, beautiful, popular, all “A+” prom queen suddenly and spectacularly bombed an important test. Or at least received a “C minus.”

Google Android fanboys (Fandroids) are also looking pretty smug these days, and why shouldn’t they? There’s of course a certain amount of schadenfreude behind the repeated nitpicking over just how many failings Apple Maps has evidenced so far in its short time since being publicly foisted upon all Apple device users that upgrade to iOS 6.

There’s also little doubt that Apple Maps will get better. Even cutting through the unusually high degree...

“Here’s our new iPhone and iPods and iTunes. Oh, look at that, we just sold 2 million iPhone 5s in 24 hours. Move along. Nothing more to see here.*

*Siri still sucks.

*Oh, btw, we’re killing Ping, because not everything we touch turns to gold, sorry.

*Our supplier Foxconn is again being accused of inhumane working conditions, but relax, most of our manufacturing is automated, at least that’s how we like to think of it.

*The camera on the iPhone 5 is the same as the one on the iPhone 4S.

*We’re getting rid of Google as much as we can on the iPhone and all of our devices, which means you have to go download YouTube on your own and you get to use an inferior Apple Maps to get around (especially inferior if you’re in a city).

*The forthcoming iPad Mini/Air is going to be a smaller iPad 2, and it’s going to rock. ”

Facebook is in trouble. The company has seen its stock price sink by over half since its initial public offering in May. Important early investors and co-founders are selling off huge chunks of their shares and all but leaving. Top executives are also heading for the exits.

What’s wrong with Facebook? In a word: ads.

Facebook is still trying to convince advertisers, its main source of revenue, that its ads work better than competitors (Google, Twitter) and other formats. It’s also trying to crack the code of mobile advertising.

Revenue projections though, are down, and Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has openly stated that mobile is his company’s greatest challenge going forward.

Facebook has changed the Internet and the way we communicate since its launch in 2004. But now Facebook faces a watershed moment. How can the company transition from Silicon Valley wunderkid...