One difference at this year's conference that I've noticed is less use of bluetooth headsets. At first, this didn't make sense to me since it seems like wireless headsets have many nice advantages for people who essentially live on their phones.

But, after surveying this for a bit, I came to the conclusion that the drop is probably due to a switch to smartphones where SMS and Email are even more effective for communicating with clients.

A review of Google Trends for "bluetooth" shows a search volume peak way back at Christmas 2005:

I've owned bluetooth headsets but using them was never habit forming. I default to SMS, Twitter, and email over actually dialing my phone 98% of the time which means I hardly use my phone as a phone. Because of this, a product that's meant to increase convenience actually becomes a pain to carry around.

Sure, there are plenty of people who are huge bluetooth headset fans. No argument there. But on the whole, it looks like the market has peaked.

1. Google Docs will add Mail Merge functionality. This highly requested feature will allow more people to rely primarily on Google Docs for their office software solution. For example, organizations could build mailing lists using the web forms available within Spreadsheets, then merge to labels with Docs.

2. The Apple TV will finally be discontinued (I'm sticking with this one for another year.)

3. FriendFeed will peak (if it hasn't already) as people realize some content is best consumed in silos.

4. Tumblr will double in traffic & users as people catch on to how easy it is to find and share really interesting stuff among friends.

5. Amazon will release a new Kindle that actually looks and feels cool. Possibly with a multi-touch screen.

6. A groundbreaking Android phone will be released with awesome technology but underwhelming sales when people fail to understand what "Android" is.

7. A least one suicide will happen at a nursing home that fails to install digital converter boxes on their patient's TVs in time.

8. At least one company will suffer from a self-inflicted PR disaster due to something they Twittered on their business account that was meant for their personal account.

9. RSS will become an important advertising technology as it is used to feed current offers into banner ads, making banners slightly more useful in 2009 than 2008.

10. Mint.com will at least double in traffic and users. They may add widgets that allow consumers to publicly share their budget goals to hold themselves accountable among their friends.

1. Netflix will deliver more content digitally than via mail in December 2008.

Hmm, I can find stats that verify this. However, Netflix has come out with their own streaming box, enabled streaming on Tivo, multiple other devices, enabled streaming for the Mac, and has made unlimited streaming available on almost all accounts (I get unlimited streaming for under $10/mo). While the paths may or may not have crossed yet, it's clear that they will if they haven't already.

2. Google will enable video-specific advertising for YouTube videos.

Yep.

3. Apple will drop Apple TV for the Mac Mini and a Mini will be available for $499.

Wrong and Wrong. Apple TV lives on and the Mac Mini starts at $599. The mini remains a better choice, in my opinion.

4. A usable wireless keyboard with touch pad will make couch surfing on a TV fun.

Yep. Although it hasn't received as much uptake as I would have imagined.

5. Google Docs will add "export as .ppt" making the Presentations application awesome.

Yep. I use it every week.

6. Yahoo will buy Zoho and build a business suite around that and Zimbra.

Nope. I didn't see the train wreck that was Yahoo in 2008 coming.

7. A team of striking writers with non-Hollywood backing will create an online show that blows away what we've seen to date.

Nope. FunnyOrDie is the closest I've seen, but it's not putting out enough volume of consistently great stuff to make this a yes.

8. The biggest news stories of the 2008 US presidential election will consistently break on blogs, Twitter, and YouTube rather than mainstream media sites.

Hard to measure, although a lot of information regarding Sarah Palin popped up on blogs. There's no question that blogs, Twitter, and YouTube played a big role in the election. Especially through content that was created by people other than the campaigns.

9. The biggest trend in YouTube videos will be how-to dance steps for popular songs. It will start to influence wedding song requests.

The how-to thing is happening, but isn't as big as I would have expected at this point. Tribute dance videos, such as the 1,810 "Put a Ring On It" videos uploaded to date have been a bigger growth industry for YouTube.

10. The Wall Street Journal's online edition will go free well before the November election. Influence will trump revenue short-term.

Surprisingly, this did not happen. But I believe the WSJ was less influential than it otherwise would have been because they didn't go free.

Not my best performance. Depending on how you judge it, I was at around 50% this year.

But what if, as a buyer, you want to get the best deal you can get on a property in your town? In that case, taking the exact opposite approach to searching may help you discover some hidden deals.

Think about it: Property listings with no photos get less traffic, thus less showings, thus less competition. Because of this, they end up staying on the market longer and end up selling for less than they otherwise would. All because the listing agent was too lazy to snap some pictures and load them to the web.

It makes me wonder how much energy lazy agents will put into other aspects of the real estate transaction from marketing through negotiating a deal. If they can't find the time to take photos, can they find time to negotiate a competitive closing price on their client's behalf?

So there's the opportunity: Dig through the dregs of home listings to find anonymous homes that will sell for less than they otherwise would. Sure, it's a major pain that you shouldn't have to go through, but the savings may make it worth the extra effort.

Great spin, but I don't think that's really why they did what they did. My guess is that they did this because they couldn't figure out a way to create value based on user's extensive search histories. Or their returns diminished to the point of not being valuable.

I can't figure out how it wouldn't be valuable to keep a rolling 1-year of data. Wouldn't it be valuable to be able to look at someone's behavior during the same time a year before, such as the holiday shopping season, to determine what a person may be looking for?

Here's an example for the term "Minneapolis":

In this example, a local news station, KARE 11, has the top search result for this term. Minneapolis largest local daily, the StarTribune, happens to be much further down the list of blogs Google Reader recommends to people searching for the term "Minneapolis."

So, what factors are at play here?

A few that appear to matter:

1. Title Tag: Use important terms to describe your blog.

2. Blog Description: This seems much less important than titles, but seems to have an effect.

3. Subscriber Volume: This isn't seem to have a strong signal, but it makes sense that they'd give higher weight to blogs others have subscribed to.

4. PageRank: I'm looking for an explanation for why Thomas Friedman's blog from the NY Times ranks as high as it does. The description uses the term Minneapolis, but it seems like it may be the PageRank of the NYTimes.com website that helps Friedman's blog rank so high for a term that's only loosely relevant to the search.

What else do you think is at play?

Companies are creating a ton of hurdles for themselves as they attempt to solve this problem. By framing the problem as a bar code scanning, reading, and transmission problem, they need to solve photo quality issues caused by humans who are very inconsistent when it comes to taking pictures.

They also have to overcome the software installation hurdle, which means they have to write software that runs on multiple platforms, convince people to install it, support the various versions over time, get people to upgrade it, etc. That's a lot of work.

With that in mind, I think a new service called BooksPrice is going about solving this interesting issue in a much smarter way. Forget about mobile software. Instead, use SMS to communicate.

People are pretty good at texting compared to taking pictures. And it's not that hard to find an text an ISBN number.

In BooksPrice.com's model, they're using Twitter to make this all happen. You follow BooksPrice on Twitter. They follow you back. Then, the next time you want to look up a book's price, just send a directly tweet to booksprice like this:

To generate a response to your phone like this:

No mobile software required. Free to consumers. Available on all mobile devices that can send/receive text messages.

Very cool.

[Bosses]can no longer afford to pretend that it's okay that you don't understand Excel, since they have to pay to have someone on site who can explain it to you. Every dollar spent paying an IT guy is a dollar not spent doing whatever it is that makes the company money. That's why it's time companies everywhere get out of the handholding business.

One way to do this would be to log how much IT support time each of your employees use. Compare that to their productivity. You may be able identify a few people who seem rather productive before you account for the $10,000 a year in IT time they're consuming.

This could help you determine who needs training or who just has to go.

Along this same line, I'm surprised at how many people will pay big bucks to learn about online advertising rather than simply giving it a try.

For example, one credit at a state run grad school appears to run around $1000 these days. In many cases, I think you could learn more about online advertising if you took $1000 of your own money and spent it on Google AdWords.

Ed's 30-Day Fast Course on Online Advertising

What you'll learn:

1. How to set up a Google AdWords Account

2. How to create a campaign

3. How to target specific regions

4. How to set day parts

5. How to select keywords

6. How to select negative keywords

7. How to use advanced matching options such as phrase and exact.

8. How to write ads

9. How to improve ads over time.

10. How to track conversions.

How will you be able to learn all of that in 30 days? By putting $1000 of your own money at risk. All of the information you need to learn how to do the above steps is publicly available. And now you have the incentive you've needed to get serious and dig in.

Here is how to do it:

Pick a product to advertise by signing up as an Amazon affiliate or at cj.com.

Then buy ads on Google AdWords to market the product you've selected.

Track your returns over the month.

By the end of the month, unless things go terribly wrong, some off your $1000 in spending will be offset by affiliate earnings. If you catch on quickly, you may actually turn a profit. If that happens, you've just added a new income stream to your household. Congratulations.

Now sit back and think about how you could apply your new-found knowledge to other industries.

To me, this is a small bet. You're risking up to $1000 to really learn how online advertising works in the real world. That is valuable stuff.

First, I don't know if Laurel happened upon a group of Luddites, but I'm going to assume for now that the situations she describes isn't unique.

If that's the case, I would imagine the reason why grad students aren't big on Twitter is that their word's current judges - their professors - are their key audience and they don't need to use Twitter to reach them. Email, phone, or physically visiting their professors in class or during office hours is probably sufficient.

But when they're out of school and trying to reach a much larger audience, they may find more use for communication technologies that scale. All of a sudden, it becomes physically impossible to email, phone, or physically visit everyone you're trying to communicate with.

Hopefully, the students realize that their lack of need is situational and will likely change over time.

However, as the above chart shows, behaviors change over time. People seem to be figuring out that they don't need to turn to the yellow pages to find what they're looking for. Instead, they can save a step by typing their query directly into search engines rather than doing a 2-step of first finding a relevant online directory, then searching.

The same thing seems to apply more generally to phone books:

Why go to an online phone book when you can search for people on Google and find out way more about a person than a online phone book provides?

Check the bottom line on both graphs. This shows how buzz worthy that specific term has been over time. Sadly for the phone book industry, in both cases biggest buzz in the past five years has been a story about print phone books that explains there are two phone books printed every year for every American.

I've been meaning to try this for some time, but doing so proved trickier than I imagined. Why? Because I haven't put much thought into how often I restock products around my house.

Amazon's grocery items seemed like a good place to find something to try. However, Amazon tends to sell grocery items in bulk, so rather than projecting when you'll run out of an item you need to project when you'll run out of 6-12-24 boxes of something.

But then I found Wheat Thins - something that you can almost always find in my house. Amazon sells them in 6-packs, and offers a 15% discount if purchased through Subscribe & Save. The longest time period for Subscribe & Save is 6 months, so as long as I can make it through one box of Wheat Thins a month, this should work out well.

I price shopped this and it looks like I'll save around $0.80 per box, or $9.60/year on this cupboard staple vs. buying it locally.

Now I want to scale this to other products. Any suggestions?