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It's 2010 - disruption is everywhere. The pace of technology is quicker and faster than ever before. News of iTablets for touch-screen magazines alerts us that we're living in a multi-channel, multi-platform, multi-device-kinda world. So how do we keep up with innovation while being mindful of resources and cost-savings?

A serious geek I know asked me how many people with gray hair were at Internet conference I had just attended. I answered that there were quite a few. He shook his head and said that when the suits take over, it's the beginning of the end of innovation.

There are two things happening here. First, the suits are taking over and, second, the pioneers are going gray. Together they make up the startup establishment. But things have changed since the early days, and this establishment hasn't kept up with the times. The current startup system essentially excludes the untapped pool of innovators who aren't developers - for example, women who want to launch Internet startups.

Editor's note: we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write 'Sponsor Posts' and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.

The holidays are underway and 'tis the season of flowing eggnog, overgenerous meals, and contemplation of both the year gone by and the year to come. Reflecting on 2009, it's obvious that there has been phenomenal growth in the business of APIs with recognized sites Best Buy, Netflix, Etsy, New York Times, CBS Interactive, PayPal, LinkedIn, and others keeping busy ramping up their API platforms to extend their businesses in new directions.

Earlier this week Myspace announced a partnership with Google to deliver real-time status updates to the search experience. As of today, the company is furthering its real-time efforts by announcing the public release of the real-time stream, status and mood commenting, open search and photo upload APIs.

Most of us have profiles on a wide variety of services these days. Thankfully, most of these profiles are available in machine-readable microformats like hCard or XFN (XHTML Friends Network). For developers, Google's Social Graph API makes discovering these profiles easier, though this is still a relatively complicated process. Now, however, Ident Engine, a new open-source JavaScript library that finds and aggregates user profiles and related activity streams, makes this process a lot easier.

You've seen the calls for open identity standards and data portability. Well, Social Beans aims to create standardized "skeleton portability" across social media publishing platforms. What is "skeleton portability"? According to co-founder Emre Sokullu, "Comments, forums, wikis, blogs, rating systems, tagging, sharing and bookmarking are all common social features of today's networking sites". Despite the fact that these are all common denominators of the web, developers continue to hack together their own proprietary implementations. Says Sokullu, "Social Beans aims to standardize a syntax around common social features including users, profiles, avatars, roles and news feeds." For developers, it's a pact for "development portability" or the agreement to follow the same rules for compilers.

We already know that Mozilla has fostered an impressive ecosystem around Firefox and its other products, but today, Mozilla Labs also launched a new directory full of interesting web apps and tools for developers. As Mozilla points out in the launch announcement, there is currently no central index of these tools, and Mozilla would like to fill this gap with the Open Web Tools Directory.

One interesting aspect of the directory is that Mozilla decided to eschew a standard, table-based layout for the directory in favor of an HTML 5 canvas based design that focuses on the products' logos. Because of this, the directory will only work on modern browsers like Safari, Chrome, Opera, and Firefox, but Internet Explorer users will be locked out.

When Apple launched the iPhone 3.0 update, we were pretty excited about a number of the new features in the OS, but push notifications, which Apple billed as an alternative to battery-draining background processes, were on the top of our list. After a few weeks with the iPhone 3.0 OS, however, only a very small number of push apps have made it into the store, and even some of the best ones, like BeeJive IM (iTunes link) and the AP Mobile app (iTunes link) suffer from major drawbacks.

The Google Code blog announced today the debut of yet another developer resource, this one focused entirely on making Internet browsing "as fast as turning the pages of a magazine."

The new site will be all about performance, "from Internet protocols to the browser to website development." When the Web is faster, the apps are faster; those idealist Googlers seem to think we should be browsing through pages, running complex apps, viewing enormous images, and streaming HD movies without delays or lag time of any kind.

"I Tried YQL Execute and All I Got Was an Authenticated Javascript API Processing Layer in the Cloud"

There's a great amount of data available on the Web in APIs or even straight HTML. It's all there for the parsing - and parsed data from social media in particular is held to be a goldmine. But traditionally, it's the heavy lifting (the broad variety of programming languages used in APIs, the challenges presented by complicated authentications, the occasional need for massive pipes) that has made accessing and sorting data into useful applications a laborious process.

Yahoo!, chiefly to serve the needs of its own engineers, has been developing a sophisticated solution that is agnostic across all Internet platforms and that lowers both the burden of labor and the barriers to entry for social and other web application developers, many of whom are already singing the praises of the newly released YQL Execute.

Many a neutech hipster looked askance at the huge IBM-plex situated front and center at this year's Web 2.0 conference.

No one could deny the hardware/software/services giant's place in tech history (their first plant is now almost 100 years old), but what does it have to do with the glassy, streamy, widgety world that tech had become? IBM staff on-site had many answers for that oft-repeated question, which was usually phrased, roughly, "What the hell are you guys doing here?"

Has this happened to you? You receive a message on Facebook that you've been tagged in a photo, but when you go to look at the photo you discover that it wasn't you at all, but some sort of product, service, or cause that a marketer is trying to promote. According to news from AdAge, this is the latest in guerrilla marketing efforts making its way through Facebook right now. It's so slimy, we hesitate to even mention it here, lest we give anyone ideas.