The Top 25 Tech Stories of 2010

The tech industry experienced as many highs as lows in 2010. As e-readers and Android phones shattered sales records, nearly every major tech company dealt with lawsuits from competitors. While the biggest social-network entrepreneur redefined his image, some of the tech industry's most popular figures showed that they couldn't keep their hard drives in their pants. Microsoft proved naysayers wrong with Kinect and an all-new smartphone lineup, while Google introduced a criminally slept-on Internet TV service and dealt with privacy debates surrounding its Street View mapping service. Then, of course, there was Apple, the one company that kept consumers hooked throughout the entire year with its next-gen iPhone and the indomitable iPad—but not without controversy. Overall, 2010 was an entertaining year in tech. From Wikileaks' extremist actions to the emergence of 4G, take a look at back at The Top 25 Tech Stories of 2010.

Date: Sept. 24, 2010

Complex says: Everyone’s online source for job searches, used furniture, and "casual encounters" went sex-free after attorney generals from 17 states demanded the site shut down its “adult services” section for promoting illegal activities such as sex trafficking. Craigslist would replace the section name with “censored” as a form of symbolic protest, but would later shut it down on its U.S. and international sites. Some critics went as far as calling Craiglist an "online pimp" and the "Wal-Mart of online sex trafficking." Talk about a smack to the face. According to the Advanced Interactive Media Group, 30 percent of the site’s revenue came from its "adult services" section. Ain't no money like ho money!

Date: Oct. 28, 2010

Complex says: The world's most populated country took the United States' crown as the country with the world's fastest supercomputer. Ladies and gents, introducing the Tianhe-1A. With billions invested in the high-performance CPU, China’s big daddy pushes up to 1.4 times more power than the previous titleholder, the Cray XT5 Jaguar, a supercomputer housed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee. Equipped with 7,168 NVIDIA M2050 graphics cards and 14,336 Intel processors, China redefined the term "superpower."

Date: May 20, 2010

Complex says: Integrating video-on-demand services, full Internet browsing, and cable programming, Google TV seemed to combine the best of all worlds. It even gave you the option to use your Android smartphone as a remote control. Just like 3-D TVs, Google TV has failed to latch onto a big audience, but with tons of promise and great user-friendly features, we think it will be big in 2011.

Date: Aug 6, 2010 (Hurd); Aug. 20, 2010 (Assange); Nov. 6, 2010 (Twitter)

Complex says: This year, some of the tech industry's big dogs tossed their HR handbooks in the trash. Former HP CEO Mark Hurd resigned after being cleared of sexual assault charges, but was caught red-handed for falsifying expense reports to cover up his relationship with a marketing consultant. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange had two suspicious sex charges brought against him by two Swedish women, a few months after infamously leaking top-secret government documents. And then there’s the case of Google tech writer Noirin Shirley, who went on her blog claiming that Twitter engineer Florian Leibert sexually harassed her at a tech conference. Here's a toast to the assholes.

Date: April 28, 2010

Complex says: The biggest tech merger of 2010 came courtesy of PC heavyweight HP purchasing smartphone pioneer Palm for $1.2 billion. Translation for investors: $5.70 per share of Palm common stock. HP announced Palm's infrastructure will not undergo any changes and will place heavy emphasis on its webOS software—developing tablets, netbooks, and a new set of Palm smartphones for 2011. Now that’s what we call smart business.

Date: April 17, 2010

Complex says: Dunce of the Year honors go to Apple software engineer Gary Powell for leaving his iPhone 4 prototype at a California bar months before its official release. An unknown patron found the next-gen smartphone and sold it to the tech site Gizmodo for $5,000. After Gizmodo refused to return the prototype to Apple and published an exclusive look on its site, Apple sent its legal team to take care of matters. A California Police Task Force raided the home of editor Jason Chen, seizing four computers and two servers. All that goes to show that you shouldn't mess with Steve Jobs.

Date: April 2, 2010

Complex says: The biggest online video rental outlet took another giant leap in the market by offering members the opportunity to wirelessly stream content on media devices, smartphones, tablets, and next-gen gaming consoles. Netflix let users download videos on the go and then pick up where they last left off at home, and vice versa. All this made Netflix the must-have app of the year.

Date: Oct. 11, 2010

Complex says: A few years back, Microsoft gained a strong start in the mobile market with its Windows Mobile software, but then dropped the ball on the development end, leaving carriers and handset makers to put their own twist on the OS. Then, when the company pulled the plug on the social-media-heavy KIN phones after just six weeks, critics labeled the Windows Phone 7 a failure before its launch. And with Apple, Android, RIM, and Symbian phones accounting for the entire smartphone market, the odds were stacked against the software giant. But, after a slow start, Microsoft's latest venture demonstrated great promise, boasting a cleaner UI than the Android platform and multimedia features almost parallel to the iPhone 4. If 1.5 million units sold in the first six weeks is a failure, we'd hate to see Microsoft succeed.

Date: March 15, 2010

Complex says: If you looked across the aisle on the train or on your flight, chances are you saw someone with an e-reader. According to reports, e-reader sales increased by 79 percent, with nearly 6.6 million units sold in 2010. Amazon recently announced its third-generation Kindle was the best-selling product in the online retailer’s history, and strong performances by Barnes & Noble's NOOK and Sony Readers helped pave the way for the monumental sales surge. Projections have 11 million units being sold in 2011.

Date: Jan. 14, 2010

Complex says: Between Oracle suing Google, Microsoft suing Motorola, and everyone suing Apple, corporate laywers made bank this year. Every tech company went the extra mile to secure its investments by taking legal action against patent-jackers. Kodak set things off by suing RIM and Apple for infringement of its digital-imaging technology. Then, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen took 12 companies to court for violating patents and using technology he helped finance a decade ago. Google even got the bad end of the sue stick as the search-engine giant faced litigation for providing unsafe directions via its Google Maps service. Moral of the story: If you deal with big money, you need a diesel legal team. Kalina!

Date: June 5, 2010

Complex says: Over the summer, Sprint popped its 4G cherry by introducing its fourth-generation wireless service, along with the world's first 4G smartphone: the HTC EVO 4G. T-Mobile and Verizon soon followed with their own high-speed service and phones. Several cities have already made the transition to support 4G connections, but there are several areas across the country where it's still missing. So as mobilephiles continue to drop serious cash on the latest and greatest smartphones, it's pretty clear that 4G will soon become the standard.



RELATED: SEE WHICH 4G MODELS MADE "THE 25 BEST SMARTPHONES OF 2010"

Date: Nov. 4, 2010

Complex says: Nintendo fanboys were quick to bash Microsoft’s motion-sensor peripheral, calling it a lame attempt to cash in on the Wii’s success. Sony attempted to take a piece of Mario’s pie with the PS3 Sony Move, but its buzz fizzled out after bad reviews and a lackluster launch. But the controler-free motion-capture camera proved why the Xbox 360 is still the leader in the next-gen wars. The Kinect has pushed more than 2.5 million units in just 25 days, with Microsoft projecting 5 million being sold by the end of the year.

Date: June 7, 2010

Complex says: Police departments across the globe utilized the social network to create homepages in an effort to catch criminals. In March, an unnamed woman found her missing daughter on the site, 15 years after her husband made off with their two- and three-year-old kids. Florida police arrested the father on two counts of kidnapping and violating child-custody orders. Then, in September, a gang from Heaton, Newcastle made the mistake of posting images of themselves brandishing weapons and gloating about previous crimes they committed. Yeah, it didn’t take long before the cops logged on and arrested the juvenile perps. Stupidity at its finest.

Date: January 1, 2010–December 31, 2010

Complex says: It seemed like everywhere you turned, someone was Shazaming a song or playing the year’s most downloaded game, Angry Birds, on their Android phone. Apple's App Store has over 300,000 apps and 7 billion downloads to date, making it the largest app store on the market. The Android Market gained steady ground as well by featuring over 175,000 apps and registering 2.2 billion downloads this year. With BlackBerry, Windows, and Nokia all joining the app-market soiree, 2011 looks to be a ridiculous year for apps.

Date: Nov. 26, 2010

Complex says: All you pirates that were looking to illegally download Kanye’s latest album might have run into Homeland Security’s welcome screen on Black Friday. One month after the government permanently shut down Limewire, the feds seized all your favorite porn and music-related peer-to-peer sites without any warning. It even went one step further and, in a puzzling Thanksgiving night bust, shut down music blogs like onsmash.com—also without explanation. If the definition of a thug is someone who does what he wants, when he wants, then the U.S. Government is the biggest thug in the land.

Date: May 14, 2010

Complex says: In an effort to strengthen security measures, Mark Zuckerberg's company integrated a new security feature to keep hackers from tapping into users’ personal information. The new feature has been compared to an online banking system, asking members to approve computer or smartphone access for their FB accounts. Unauthorized devices would be blocked from logging in and an email or text message would be sent to warn users of any illegal activity. Considering Facebook hosts over 400 million users, and all that personal information is up for grabs, you can bet everyone is playing it safe right now.

Date: June 24, 2010

Complex says: The fourth-generation iPhone offered industry-leading features such as the best media player, biggest app store, and most user-friendly UI, but hardware issues such as fragile Gorilla Glass casing and yellow bands appearing on the touchscreen plagued the first few shipments. Then came Antennagate: a controversy caused by the reception loss that occurred when owners applied a tight grip to the phone’s lower left corner, where the antenna was placed. Instead of replacing phones, Apple opted for a more simple (read: cheaper) solution to fix the problem: offering a free bumper case. Not many dropped-call complaints have been recorded since, but Antennagate and the iPhone will forever be linked. Oh well, you know you still want one.

Date: May 10, 2010

Complex says: Led by those awesome Droid commercials and its open-source-friendly App Market, Android became the preferred mobile platform in 2010. The Google-powered handsets pushed major sales for Verizon, propelled Sprint’s 4G phones to mainstream success, and spawned several phone franchises—such as the Samsung Galaxy S—to help it move past the likes of the iPhone and BlackBerry. Second only to Nokia in worldwide market share (with 25 percent), Google showed how free software pays in the long run.

Date: Sept. 23, 2010

Complex says: Twitter fanatics poked fun and office workers across the globe nearly died of boredom as the largest social network on Earth experienced service outages for two full days. Facebook officials blamed the problem on a third-party network provider and an “error condition” in their database. According to AlertSite, Facebook functioned at a 38-percent availability rate with a 60-second response time. That’s almost slower than surfing on a dial-up connection.

Date: May 26, 2010

Complex says: The most tragic tech story of 2010 revolves around the suicides at the world's largest electronics manufacturer: Foxconn. Responsible for building parts for every major tech company from Apple to Nintendo, the company suffered 10 suicide deaths during 2010, with rumors of inhumane working conditions and mistreatment swarming media outlets and Internet blogs. Since the tragedies, Foxconn has instituted new measures to help raise awareness and prevent future deaths—installing safety nets on buildings, providing group counseling, and offering 30-percent raises. That's cool and all, but we're still curious to know what goes on behind closed factory doors. There's going to be a movie about this in 10 years.

Date: Dec. 21, 2010

Complex says: The Federal Communications Commission voted to pass the first of what could be many net neutrality laws—laws that grant Web surfers access to any legal online material from their home, along with set regulations to protect people’s web-browsing rights on their smartphones and other mobile devices. That means you’ll have full access to all legal content: applications, online calling services, etc. Web companies are now forced to implement new techniques for routing traffic and security measures that do not obstruct FCC regulations. Will these new net neutrality laws work? Well, we'll have to see, now, won't we?

Date: Sept. 22, 2010

Complex says: Facebook CEO and president Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t crowned Time’s Person of the Year just for running the world's largest social network. The billionaire college dropout served as inspiration for what was arguably the year’s best film, The Social Network. Zuckerberg even turned philanthropist, offering $100 million to help rebuild Newark public schools, and joined Bill Gates' elite contribution campaign, The Giving Pledge, which enlists billionaires to pledge half of their fortunes toward noble causes. That doesn't sound like the brat that was depicted on-screen.

Date: April 3, 2010

Complex says: The introduction of the iPad helped set the standard for what the next-gen portable PC will be by combining the power of a laptop with the mobility of a smartphone. Apple’s latest gem offered a stunning 9.7-inch multi-touch screen with sharp visuals, dope exclusive apps, 3G/wi-fi capabilities, and an impressive 10-hour battery life. Having sold more than 8.5 million units by year’s end, Steve Jobs proved that netbooks aren't the end-all, be-all for portable computing. As RIM prepares to launch its own tablet, the BlackBerry PlayBook, and the Samsung Galaxy Tablet gaining heavy momentum, Apple’s already working on its second-generation model, due out next year.

Date: Jan. 12, 2010

Complex says: After Google detected several cyber attacks targeting Gmail users in China, the country banned all Google search sites for not complying with domestic Internet censorship policies. As if one country wasn’t pissed enough, Google managed to make the shit lists of other powerful countries with its infamous Street View project. The Google Maps add-on captured provocative panoramic views and broke privacy laws from the United States all the way to South Korea by collecting private data from unprotected wireless networks. We know Google's hoping for a less tumultuous 2011.

Date: April 5, 2010

Complex says: After leaked footage of a 2007 American army assault in Baghdad surfaced on the net, the whistle-blower website created a frenzy all over the world. Wikileaks' creator, Internet activist Julian Assange, quickly became Public Enemy No. 1 with his radical actions: leaking over 92,000 documents related to the Afghanistan War, classified U.S. counterintelligence reports, and other top-secret files that have jeopardized national security and damaged international relations among world superpowers. Governments consider him the antichrist, activists consider him a role model. Us? We just think he’s one of the ballsiest motherfuckers in history. Salute.