ReadWriteWeb

Before any professional investor makes a play in a new market, she makes or acquires a reasonable estimate of its size. Not only does demand come into play, but the availability of resources with which a healthy level of demand may be supplied. You can't create a market simply by flooding it with products that people will decide, based on their wide availability, that they somehow want.

The very first pictures of "Longhorn," the development build of Windows that became Vista and Windows Server 2008, were characterized by a rich sidebar along one side of the screen. The moment Microsoft revealed pictures of these early builds, it told developers and members of the press that this sidebar constituted a new ecosystem - a garden where a wellspring of new, small, and useful apps will grow and flourish.

Like the popular flight-finding service Kayak, a new startup called Sparkbuy, launching at the Web 2.0 Expo today, wants to make the process of finding the perfect gadget easier using a similar simplified interface. Although consumers already have a number of gadget-shopping services at their disposal, including everything from Google Product Search to Amazon, Sparkbuy is innovating through its easy-to-use website design and its manuallymcurated collection of data.

The result is a gadget-shopping site that even the most woefully un-tech-savvy consumer could use, while still appealing to gadget geeks looking for an easier comparison shopping tool.

Today at the Consumer Electronics Show, All Things Digital's Kara Swisher interviewed Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and started off with the most obvious question - what was Twitter doing at a gadget show? According to Costolo, Twitter had been busy meeting with several device makers to try to make it easier and more consistent to use the microblogging platform across multiple platforms and devices, including becoming an embedded feature of some phones.

Today, the company is announcing that the first Outlook gadgets have now gone live.

Jaron Lanier was a pioneer of "virtual reality" in the early 1980s and in his book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, he makes the case for a more humanistic approach to Internet technology. Lanier rails against web 2.0, which he calls at the start of the book "a torrent of petty designs" and "freedom [...] more for machines than people."

Lanier's main issue with web 2.0 is that, in his view, it promotes the 'hive mind' over individual expression. He writes that web 2.0 presents the current generation of kids with a "reduced expectation of what a person can be."

Today marks the official start to the 2010 Consumer Electronics Showcase in Las Vegas where all of the biggest electronics manufacturers show off their coolest and newest products. While CES is mainly a gadget show, entrepreneurs looking for the next big thing should pay close attention to the innovative ideas being pushed into the consumer market.

The big show is just getting underway, but we are already seeing some trends emerge that could point to new opportunities for startups in 2010.

It's been almost a year since I last worked with DIY repair site FixYa but I still remember the traffic spike we'd see every Christmas. While families would be thrilled to unwrap smart phones, netbooks and flat screen monitors in the early morning, they'd find themselves lost in a sea of instructions by noon. There is nothing worse than having a new shiny toy and not being able to play with it. In addition to FixYa, below are a few resources you can use to help set up your new gadgets.

It's tough to find a great geek present during Black Friday sales. Thousands wait in line at department stores and electronic shops
in the hopes of scoring a bargain on laptops, netbooks and mobile accessories. For the shy netizen, the idea of facing these crowds can be daunting. Rather than scouring the malls for holiday presents, consider returning to your web-based roots. Below is ReadWriteWeb's list of 10 gadget, gear and geek gift sites.

Everyone is falling all over themselves to talk about tablets. Yesterday Wired.com topped them all in the hype department by declaring 2010 to be the year of the tablet. But let's just slow down a minute. Yes, a big old pane of multi-touch goodness is a thing of beauty, and we're just as susceptible to its magic as you are. But there's a reason tablets haven't caught on to date.

Today, the web office company Zoho, whose line of products competes with other web applications like Google Docs and Gmail as well as desktop-based suites like Microsoft Office, has launched a new product: Zoho Gadgets. With these gadgets, data from Zoho applications can be integrated into Facebook, Gmail, iGoogle, Orkut and other online networks. Because the gadgets are built using the OpenSocial standard, they can be supported by any OpenSocial compatible network.