The best and worst of 2008

Young people: They use up the bandwidth with their videos and damn social networking. They use new digital devices like they are extensions of their hands. They illegally download music and want it all, wherever and whenever they want. And their text lingo habits are undermining what few good grammar and spelling habits remain.

The economy: While the current economic troubles are affecting everyone negatively, companies are starting to use them as the be-all, end-all excuse for bad performance or execution. It's not always the economy, stupid.

Republicans: Specifically George W. Bush — well, we won't have him to kick around anymore now, will we?

TOP WANNA ‘SEES’ AT A TELECOM TRADE SHOW

Anyone from Google, talking about telecom ambitions.

Steve Jobs. If the man from Apple has something to say, he hosts his own trade show. Despite Jobs' recent influence over the wireless industry, he hasn't been to a single wireless event.

Bill Smith, AT&T. A fixture at industry trade shows when CTO of BellSouth, Smith has a less public role at AT&T. Given his willingness to tackle tough technology questions off the cuff, we'd like to see him back on the speaker circuit.

AT TELEPHONY, 2008 WAS THE YEAR OF MAGICJACK

Our first story on this new device/cheap phone service appeared in late 2007, but the real furor began early this year. That story repeatedly showed up in our “Most Popular Articles” section online and began generating phone calls to our office from magicJack users looking for customer service, tech support and/or refunds after finding no phone numbers on the magicJack site. That led to more coverage, some blog entries, accusations by one blogger that we were shilling for magicJack, and instant popularity for any story that mentioned the device. By the way, our editor-in-chief still has hers, mint in the box.

RUMORS WE'D LIKE TO SEE COME TRUE

SKYPE-KILLER

AT&T, BT, NTT and other incumbents are planning to launch a global service to take on the VoIP provider.

PLAYSTATION MOBILE PHONE

It's every pre-teen boy's dream, and the prototype patents have been around for years. If Apple can do it, creating a phone can't really be that hard, right?

CISCO IPTV MIDDLEWARE

The router giant remains quiet on speculation that this product is in the making, but it would appear to be the missing link in its end-to-end IPTV platform. The only better rumor is that Cisco will buy one of the many existing middleware vendors and give Microsoft a real run for its money.