ReadWriteWeb

As each year passes, the connected car makes more of a noise at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. This year several car manufacturers were touting new features, including Mercedes-Benz, Ford and Audi. The term "connected car" refers to the integration of smartphone apps and content into the car. Typically this is done via the car's dashboard, enabling you to listen to online music, access Web data, stream video to the car's passengers and more. In this post we'll look at three such systems: Ford Sync, Mercedes-Benz mbrace2 and Audi Connect.

What all three of the above car manufacturers, and others like General Motors and Toyota, have in common is that they are leveraging the rapid evolution of smartphone technology - rather than trying to build new Internet devices into their cars.

Every year since 2004, ReadWriteWeb has selected a best "little company." These are small companies (loosely defined as less than 100 employees) that have had a big effect on the Web over the calendar year. Last year we chose Tumblr, which experienced extraordinary growth during 2010. In prior years we've given this honor to Aardvark (2009), Zoho ('08), Twitter ('07), YouTube ('06), 37Signals ('05) and Flickr ('04). Many of those companies went onto much bigger things, either through acquisition (Flickr, YouTube) or by ramping up independently (Twitter, Zoho).

This year there were a number of worthy contenders for Best LittleCo. Square, Evernote, Flipboard, BetaWorks, SoundCloud and Tumblr (again) have all had cracker years. So our winner must be something pretty special, right?

Our annual Best Of series continues with the top 10 Web products that revolutionized old services and created new ones this year. Yesterday, Richard MacManus rounded up the top 10 social Web products, featuring services that focus on social networking and community building. This round-up is about the Web products that changed the things we do online.

The categories vary here from browsers to cloud drives to mobile apps and more. But all of these services redefined a core use case for the Web, and some of them invented activities we didn't know we needed. Here are our top 10 Consumer Web Products of 2011:

So far in our series exploring cloud computing for consumers, we've looked at calendars and music. In the multi-device world we now live in, files from your computer are also increasingly being stored in the cloud.

One of the leading Internet companies of this era is essentially a hard drive in the cloud. Dropbox, by some measures the world's 5th most valuable startup, makes it easy for you to sync files across devices. There are other, similar services too. Or you can go completely virtual by using an online office suite like Google Docs. In this article we outline some of the ways that you too can use the cloud to store your files.

If you have purchased a Ford with its SYNC software package in the past several years, starting early next year you can upgrade your car to the latest version that it will be shipping in its 2013 models, and for free. Yes, finally there is a car company that operates like a computer company, and I mean that in all the good aspects. (Note: I have test driven numerous Ford and Lincoln models, and own one myself.)

One of the announcements from today's Apple event was iCloud, described as "a set of free [with iOS5] cloud services that work with your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac or PC to automatically and wirelessly store your content in iCloud and push it to all your devices." In other words, iCloud is a file synchronization and sharing solution for Apple devices. Similar in some ways to Dropbox, the leading independent sync solution and arguably the world's 5th most valuable startup.

The big question is: can Apple finally get sync right? Apple promises that iCloud will integrate "seamlessly with your apps, so everything happens automatically." It's absolutely crucial that Apple delivers on that promise, because sync is a key part of the multi-device world that we now live in. Perhaps for the first time since Android appeared on the scene to challenge the iPhone, Apple is at risk of losing customers if iCloud fails.

Dropbox, the online file sync and sharing service, was recently named 5th in a list of the The World's Most Valuable Startups by Business Insider. To put that in context, the only 4 companies ranked above Dropbox were (in order of valuation): Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and Twitter. Dropbox was listed above the likes of Wikipedia, Craigslist, Hulu and Tumblr. Business Insider estimated the value of Dropbox at $4 billion, based on its latest funding round at the end of August.

But let's face it, this valuation of Dropbox cannot be relied on. That $4 billion is mostly derived from fat cat VCs competing for a hot deal. It's far more important to ask: who is using Dropbox currently and is there anything in the use cases that justifies such a high valuation? So I asked the tech-savvy RWW community just that.

In a review of Sherry Turkle's book Alone Together, John Battelle notes a familiar experience in regards to technology: "this cake ain't baked. I mean, think about it. Facebook: Not quite right. Smart phones? Not quite right. Desktop computing? Even though we've had nearly three decades of interaction, it's still not quite right."

This issue is only going to get worse, as more and more devices get connected to the Internet. John referenced several separate instances of not fully baked cakes... er, products. Those issues are magnified when a lot of imperfect products are connected together in a network, whether it be a home or work network - or the Internet at large. Plus those products run on software that is never perfect and is always being iterated on (an Operating System, as probably the biggest example). And did I mention the problems with syncing data across different devices?

Today both Toyota and Ford announced a new effort to jointly author telematics standards for their in-car electronics. While not visible to any of us mere mortals that just drive the car, the joint effort should result in better in-vehicle cellphone and other wireless device usage, along with better privacy and security standards for Internet connectivity from our cars. The two have created a memo of understanding and have begun work on a series of feasibility studies.

The current Internet era is characterized by multiple devices, including mobile phones, tablets, Internet TVs, netbooks, laptops, and of course the good old PC. One of the key services needed in this multi-device online world is reliable synchronization. Yet faulty or not-quite-optimal sync is one of the problems I experience the most these days.

Just before I started writing this, I was attempting to sync data from the online note-taking app Evernote. I had made some notes on my iPad Evernote app while in a cafe, where I didn't have Internet connectivity (I'm a premium subscriber to Evernote, so I have offline access to my data). When I attempted to sync up that content to my Evernote desktop app in my home office, it didn't immediately update. I refreshed... then again... no sync. Perplexed, I moved onto another activity and then checked again 5 minutes later. By then the changes had synced up, but the delay was disconcerting.