Details on Bug Labs are starting to emerge (see posts by investors Brad Feld and Fred Wilson).

I’m excited about this and think tremendous potential will be unlocked as data and content are increasingly mixable with device functionality. I’ve alluded to this before in terms of user utility, but I’m not just thinking about fun gadgets and 30-boxes-enabled dog bowls. Think devices that will change the world for the handicapped, for example.

Wireless rabbits and squeezy widget viewers are only the beginning; the internet of things is coming. True open-platform potential ups the ante in a very interesting way. Good luck guys!

I had the pleasure of attending ToyFair once or twice as a kid, since my dad was in the toy advertising industry, and it can only be described as adolescent nirvana. But it’s also an important window into the lifecycle of consumer adoption and, in some cases, the mainstreaming of technology.

My prized trophy from my first visit was an original prototype Hacky Sack, which I was intially under-impressed with — as were my friends at school — but turned out to be much fun when it became a pop-culture phenomenon many months after my well-informed prognostications that it would do so. (So I guess in that respect ToyFair was also a good early lesson in the power of marketing.)

Ventureblogalist has a writeup of some interesting finds at this year’s - see NYC Toy Fair at Ventureblogalist - and it shows some really promising things going on with making web and 2.0 technologies consumer-friendly. Nice to see some true startups in there too.

I had nothing to do with it whatsoever, but I’ve been watching from the sidelines with near-amazement a new Yahoo! service called Pipes.

It’s a stunning visual editor for web data services - reducing the friction required to normalize multiple data inputs, apply operations and parameters to them, and extract standardized outputs.  The benefit, of course, is to enable unexpected data mashups and new kinds of visualizations, along the lines I’ve talked about before here.  Jeremy Z and Tim O’Reilly do it better justice than I do.  I’m delighted to see a few others are picking up on it - to the point, it appears, that the service is down at the moment.

Congratulations to Pasha (who seems to have taken the opportunity to launch a blog) and the rest of the team that made this happen.

This is a taste of the power of a seamless client/web app, and a great example of some of the things I was talking about here.  It is what the whole widget thing will become it grows up.

It is the future.

(And Chris Shipley should take a cue from Fred W. and provide embed code for her videos.)

Wow, enough’s been written about widgets in the last week to fill a year’s worth of predictions. Fred is for them (subject to user happiness); Nick is apparently against them; and the New York Times just got around to discovering them.

Clearly they’re already the focus of some investor thinking and attention (Yahoo! corp dev folks are even talking about them publicly), and Newsweek has called 2007 the Year of the Widget, so it would be superfluous to call this a prediction from here. But I do think this ties into a broader trend that’s of interest, and that the market may resolve itself in unexpected ways.

This trend is about data visualization, presentation, syndication, and control. After all, publisher widgets are basically just websites - really small websites. And desktop widgets are client apps with small windows. (Though I don’t think client web apps are the future, given that there’s already a very effective client app called a “browser” on most pc’s today that do everything a widget client could do.)

What we’re seeing in the explosion of activity around widgets and embedded apps on MySpace is really the convergence of several trends that I think will all be (or continue to be) important this year: The portability of data streams, and the corresponding ability to aggregate them from around the web, apply rules to them, and ultimately control them at the consumer level. This broad trend leads to:

• New ways of visualizing data streams, especially as led by widgets right now. I’m also including “widgety” experienes like Netvibes here - but this is just a small part of a much bigger trend, as are Ambient devices and RSS-enabled rabbits. To build on the above comment about really small web pages, widget carriages are ultimately just like blog templates - rich presentation layers into which you pump your choice of content. People have lots of data available and will need lots of ways to view it.
• Social transparency and syndication. I can choose what content I expose in “publishery” applications, and I am almost automatically “publishery” in my social applications and digital self-expression because my friends can consume and subscribe to my stuff in reader-like ways. I have increasing ability to apply degree-based rules to this publication (let my friends but not my contacts see data, etc.).
• Data and content pushing upstream into communications. Aren’t IM windows and “you’ve got mail” pop-ups just desktop widgets? I can already subscribe to RSS alerts in IM and integrate messaging at the user & data level into my Yahoo! email in a way that provides a rich, seamless experience. I already consume my RSS feeds into my Outlook client (via Newsgator). There will be much more of this.
• On a related note, presence. That tv commercial where the guy’s watching a show on his laptop, big screen, and mobile window will happen for internet apps and presence-based communications first.
• Information control and data productivity. New apps and platforms are emerging to let users apply these trends to each other. Wesabe lets users do something interesting and valuable by combining a feed of their personal financial data and a social pool of user-generated content about merchants and transaction types, with a high level of security and control. Touchstone is about creating a high degree of control and intelligent automation over how communication and presence data are presented and consumed. These are platforms that allow user data mashups, and you don’t have to be a developer to leverage their power.
• I will probably post at greater length about the specific problem of productivity and Getting Things Done, but the kernel of the idea is, more and more of our communications are digital, more and more of our “to do’s” live in emails and IMs, and more and more important actions and decisions in our lives can be driven off of open-standards-based data and content (like digital wallets. . . or automatic mortgage re-fis). Managing personal and business productivity against all this data is thus more and more of a challenge - and a huge business opportunity. We’ll see how far Microsoft moves the ball forward with Vista - my bet is I still won’t be able to get my RSS, email, calendar, and to-do list to play perfectly with each other even in the same application, let alone across windows.
• That also touches on the issue of synchronization. Much has been said lately about web-based apps vs. client apps. It’s kind of a no-brainer to me that we need the power of the real-time web in all of our business applications now; lightning-fast access to our document data; access to our data via all our windows, even when we’re offline; automatic synching of docs modified offline; and always-safe, always-secure automatic backup of our precious data to the co-lo of our choice, be that an internet cloud or an expensive box in the basement. What’s so hard about that?
• Smart systems. By the way, I really don’t want to have to spend weekends at a time reorganizing my digital photo collection and figuring out 1,001 Lifehacker iTunes hacks.
• Oh, did I mention search? Hehehe.

With all the talk about the merging of personal publishing and media consumption, I am reminded of a few lines of doggerel an English poetry professor once shared with my very literary theory-weary class:

Do ya wanna know the creda’
Of Jacques Derrida?

There is no writa’
And there ain’t no reada’
Eitha’

Fred W. had an interesting post the other day suggesting user-controlled pages on Flickr that both echoed some things I’ve been thinking about and led me to Scott Karp’s interesting essay on the Death of the User (choice quote: “In most cases ‘users’ in Media 2.0 are defined as the ‘people formerly known as the audience’”).

My own thinking on this stems from my continual amazement at the way MySpace, which many observers rightly note as a tipping point in the mainstreaming of blogging and personal publishing, perhaps even more importantly fuses general communication and content consumption with content publication. MySpace is not just outbound; it is email inbox 2.0. (And people wonder why mobile hasn’t taken off.)

At the same time, services like flickr and YouTube and Twitter, and technologies like tagging and RSS, continue to arrive to serve specific types of content production and community well (or at least interestingly). And those of us that have crossed into this world of personal & social transparency (a rubicon it seems) will inevitably continue to experiment with and invest in the most compelling.

This leads to a three-fold problem: As a user, I want to aggregate the things I consume effectively and across all of my consumption devices and venues. I may want to publish my aggregation in various ways in various media, like a blogroll on my blog, bookmarks on del.icio.us, or an OPML file or attention stream in a conference panel bio. (Thus, “distributed aggregation”.) Also, as I chime in with my comments and ratings and other UGC submissions, this becomes part of the publishing side of the problem as well.

As a publisher, I want to streamline my production across many points of access while providing a good, unified experience to some members of my audience. I may want to be able to control my profile pages at Flickr and other places - both to reflect my self-expression goals and to capture data that lets me know how I’m doing - but I don’t want to be responsible for maintaining 13 websites. I want the principle of “write once / publish many” to apply not only to my blog posts, but also to my preferences as a publisher. Thus, aggregated distribution.

Finally, from the point of view of efficiency and value-creation, there is a lot of interesting attention that could be harnessed (and fat in the system that could be eliminated) for the benefit of advertisers, knowledge-aggregation companies like Yahoo! and Google, and, more generally, anyone who wants to communicate with like audiences either in niches or en masse (i.e., media) efficiently. Again, aggregated distribution.

There are more than a few companies playing successfully at solving parts of these problems - NetVibes, and TACODA come to mind along with others, as do features introduced by Yahoo! and Google to blend some aspects of communication (mail and IM, email and RSS). There have also been some interesting attempts that haven’t quite taken root (e.g., Rojo). But there’s a lot left to do to solve the problem of “distributed aggregation” of content publishing, and I think this is a problem that will continue to resonate and drive valuable innovation this year.

Related to this problem of course is the need for an effective way to manage identity and privacy: it’s easy for me if I can have one list of friends not 12, but I don’t want all my business friends to see all of my flickr posts, I probably don’t want all of my business research behaviors impacting my behaviorally targeted advertising, and I certainly don’t want to publish my bookmarks and shopping behaviors related to sensitive personal topics. At the same time, managing preferences and terminology across all the different social venues I participate in is a pain in the ass.

I would expect some interesting entries that come at this problem in ways we haven’t seen before (and probably also better, easier-to-use versions of things we have). I would also expect some of the GEMAYA properties and “anchor tenants” in the core related businesses (UGC, news and content aggregation, search, advertising) to make moves toward more effectively meshing content production, consumption, and identity. Hopefully, there will be both good internal innovation here and plenty of interesting M&A opportunities.

Finally, I’m gonna go ahead and make one actual prediction: that at least one “unexpected” large company will participate impactfully in this reader/publisher/attention/identity fabric.

There’ve been a lot of “big in ‘07″ prediction posts (VC Mike has a good roundup). Although I initially sort of tuned out and didn’t feel the need to pile on my own opinion (after all, New Year’s is a totally arbitrary milepost from which to make industry prognostications), the meme did stimulate me, and a few thoughts have filtered to the top that I want to write about.

Rather than focus on predictions for the calendar year, though, I thought I’d muse on a few ideas - just notes from my own trench, really - that are interesting conversation points and that I think may accrue to be “winning themes” in different segments of the industry, but that may or may not reach maturity in the next four quarters.

I’ll do those in individual posts after this one and over the next few weeks. (I’ve added a new category, “2007″, as well.)

Of course the big overall theme here is innovation, which seems boundless and ever-cheaper, and continues to stimulate the startup community, the internet economy, and the media industry in general. 2007 will undoubtedly make for an exciting year no matter which individuals turn out to be right.