Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

The eight technologies identified include the following:

Bluetooth 3.0

This is one of the no-brainers on the list. The Bluetooth 3.0 specification will be released this year and devices will start to hit the shelves by 2010. At this point, it's expected that the 3.0 spec will include faster speeds, reportedly transferring files at 480 megabits per second in close proximity and 100 megabits per second at 10 meters. It will also feature an ultra-low-power mode that Gartner predicts will enable new peripherals, sensors, and applications, such as health monitoring. The technology will be backwards compatible, allowing old devices to communicate with new ones, so there's no reason for it not take off in the upcoming years.

Mobile User Interfaces + Mobile Web/Widgets

Mobile user interfaces and mobile web/widgets were listed separately, accounting for two items on the list, but we think they can be lumped together. They all point to how mobile computing is rapidly becoming a new platform for everything from consumer mobile apps to B2E (business-to-employee) and B2C (business-to-customer). (Gartner did not include B2B on their list.) Modern day smartphones like the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, the upcoming Pre, and others deliver better interfaces for browsing the web, thus making it accessible to more people. Widget-like applications, including those that replicate thin client technology, will become more common especially in B2C strategies. Yet the mobile web still has challenges ahead. For example, there are no standards for browser access to handset services like the camera or GPS, the report notes.

Location Awareness

Location sensing, powered by GPS as well as Wi-Fi and triangulation, opens up new possibilities for mobile social networking and presence applications. Technology's earliest adopters are already familiar with social networks like Brightkite and Loopt which let you reveal your location to a network of friends. But we're still on the tip of this iceberg. Take for example, the iPhone IM client Palringo, they're just now adding location services to their application. This allows users to see how far away their contacts are, introducing a whole new dimension to mobile communication. Over the next year or two, this sort of technology is expected to become more commonplace, but it will also raise questions about privacy. Will you want your network of online friends and acquaintances to really know your exact location? Will turning off location awareness signal that you're up to something sneaky (so asks the suspicious wife, husband, boss, etc.)? As a society, we will have to answer these questions and more in the near future.

Near Field Communication (NFC)

NFC is a technology that provides a way for consumers to use their mobile phones for making payments, among other things. It's something that has taken off in many countries worldwide, but certainly not all, and definitely not in the United States just yet. Unfortunately, Gartner predicts that the move towards mobile payment systems will still not occur this year or the next in mature markets like the U.S. and Western Europe. Instead, NFC is more likely to take off in emerging markets. Other uses of the technology, such as the ability to transfer photos from phone to digital photo frames, will also remain elusive to more developed markets.

802.11n & Cellular Broadband

802.11n, a specification for wireless local area networks (WLANs), initially gave us pause. Although not ratified as an official standard yet, the technology is already commonplace. However, until it "goes gold" so to speak, it won't really infiltrate the mobile world. Even the ubiquitous iPhone only supports 802.11 b/g at the moment. 

On the flip side, the other Internet connection technology, cellular broadband, has the potential to make Wi-Fi almost unnecessary, at least for achieving high speeds. In addition to mobile phones, laptop makers will likely continue to incorporate this technology into their netbooks and notebooks using modern chipsets that provide superior performance to our current crop of add-on cards and dongles.

Display Technologies

Display technologies will also see improvements in the upcoming years. New technologies like active pixel displays, passive displays and pico projectors will have an impact. Pico projectors - the tiny portable projectors we saw being introduced at this year's CES - will enable new mobile use cases. Instant presentations in informal settings could become more common when there isn't large, cumbersome equipment to set up. The different types of display technologies introduced in 2009 and 2010 will become important differentiators between devices and will impact user selection criterion, says Gartner.

For more information on these above technologies, you can read through the full report available here on Gartner's web site.

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments on how you think the mobile space will be impacted in the future.

The latest mobile web apps that have knocked our socks off are from a startup of ex-Googlers called NextStop and the Yahoo-owned events calendar Upcoming. Both offer new mobile iPhone apps that can be updated seamlessly, are available immediately and are a lot of fun to use. Could mobile web apps challenge the dominance of native apps on the iPhone? That's an active debate.

NextStop

NextStop is a local review site that has positioned itself as "Yelp for Travelers" but needn't be limited to travelers alone. Though it doesn't have the traction that Yelp has yet, its feature set is far superior. The two biggest differentiators of its mobile site are the ability to view collections of activities near your location and the ability to easily post attractive reviews of places from your phone. Yelp doesn't allow users to publish reviews from their phones but NextStop makes it a joy. User Experience throughout the site is really well done.

NextStop is more attractive than Yelp's iPhone app, it encourages you to put a bookmark on your phone's desktop and there's an integrated photo uploading app coming soon as a work around to that limitation. Once you put that bookmark on your dekstop, NextStop caches a long list of images and javascript so it will load very fast the next time you visit the page. IPhone app? Why bother?

It's a wonder to behold and could become my new first stop for planning an evening on the town, even if I have to go to Yelp for now to check out more reviews of the places NextStop suggests I go.

If you'd like a more in-depth look at the use of HTML5 by NextStop, make sure to check out Robert Scoble's interview with the company.

Upcoming

Yahoo's Upcoming is a great social events calendar. As of today, navigate to m.upcoming.yahoo.com and you'll find the service's beautiful new mobile web app. It looks good on the iPhone, on Android and on quite a number of other browsers that it's on the lookout for as well. It's the kind of interface that makes me want to use Upcoming more regularly!

Bookmark this puppy onto the desktop of your iPhone and you'll have a great way to catch up on upcoming local events when you're on the go. It's all about finding a good interface for users to plug into at the right time in the flow of their day. This is a great example of that - and why make a native iPhone app when you can get all the functionality packed into this mobile web app?

Web vs. Native Mobile Apps

Raven Zachary and Jason Grigsby are two mobile developers based in Portland, Oregon. They worked together building the Obama Presidential Campaign's celebrated iPhone app. After that project was done, the two parted ways to their respective companies. Zachary, who was project director for the Obama app, started SmallSociety - an iPhone development shop that's built native apps for high-profile companies like Whole Foods and Cliff Bar. His company's ZipCar app was showcased on stage at the MacWorld event announcing the iPhone SDK. Zachary is a big believer in native mobile apps.

Grigsby co-founded CloudFour, a mobile app shop that took a very different direction.

"After launching the Obama app," Grigsby says, "we had people coming to us for native apps every day, but we decided we only wanted to do mobile web apps. Philosophically, I don't see any way that web app technology isn't going to be bigger than distributing apps through an app store. As the demographics of users change, you'll find people aren't going to spend their time browsing the app store. They will go to browse the web and they aren't going to install something unless it's heavily promoted. Who's going to do that? Small businesses are going to need mobile apps if they are going to be found at all."

Zachary disagrees, though, and the two say this is something they have friendly arguments about frequently.

"[Users] already browse the web more than anything else, with the possible exception of listening to music," Zachary contends. "Apps appeal to consumers in a way that the web simple doesn't today. The first step is getting a great mobile browser into the hands of consumers. That cuts out pretty much all Nokia, Windows Mobile and Blackberry consumers right away. That's a huge portion of the market. That's going to take years to rollout, and for those consumers to adapt. Meanwhile, iPhone app market keeps growing."

Zachary also contends that gaming will be key. "The mainstream gaming market will always be native. HTML 6 or 7 isn't going to solve that problem. [Because those games require] direct access to hardware. Gaming drives a large percentage of native app revenue."

What do you think? Is the future all about mobile web apps or will most app development continue to be for native mobile apps, now that there are some compelling and widely used mobile app platforms?

Baio is a thinker, a hacker of big social patterns and an admirer of the collective intelligence that emerges from groups of people acting independently on the web. We sat down with him this week and discussed some of his ideas about what makes good social software grow.

In addition to Upcoming, Baio is also well known for his quirky, smart writing and link sharing at Waxy.org. His best known works there include tracking piracy data for Oscar nominated films for the past six years, the first published interview with an Italian factory worker who mysteriously produced the most-viewed video of all 2008 on YouTube and a number of fascinating experiments with Amazon's Mechanical Turk system, including one titled The Faces of Mechanical Turk - he payed Turk workers a small sum to post their pictures with a sign saying why they participated.

After years of experience, observation and thought, here are a few pearls of wisdom Andy offered us about how to build compelling social software. You can also follow Baio on Twitter @waxpancake.

Build to Existing Social Connections

The company Baio has joined is called Kickstarter. It's a service that lets people fund small projects by collecting "all or nothing" pledges from people around web - if a project's financial goal is met by its deadline then the money is collected, but if the goal isn't met then no one's contribution is withdrawn. The site will open to the public at the end of August, but one principle that he's had underlined by his experience with beta testers and from his time at Upcoming is this: you can't just post a request for funds or an events listing up on the web and expect strangers to stumble upon it and give it support. In both cases, these sites provided infrastructure that allowed users to reach out through their own established networks and say "here's where we're processing your show of support."

It's like social middle-ware, these kinds of services are neither inherently viral nor really destination sites where people come to browse. They add value in ways that people can't easily produce themselves - RSVP lists, maps, etc in the case of Upcoming or time-delayed money processing in the case of Kickstarter - and thus give users an incentive to reach out and ask friends to visit their pages on the sites.

Social Goals Are Front and Back End Heavy

Kickstarter's early beta tests mirror what Baio saw at Upcoming when it comes to distribution of social input. It tends to come in the most at the very beginning and at the very end. At first, project initiators are enthusiastic and do a lot of promotion. Then, if they later get close to their goals then they do a final push to promote their project. That's especially true with Kickstarter, where 90% of a fund raising goal is as good as nothing at all - users will lose all the support they've gained unless they put out another push to pass 100%

Baio says that he's looked at the numbers and found that the two biggest factors in project success at Kickstarter appear to be offering rewards if the goal is met and sending out regular updates to supporters of a project.

The Kickstarter crew isn't creating content themselves, they are creating software for other people to create content. "One thing I found out over the last year," Baio told us, "is that writing doesn't scale. When you code, it takes on a life of its own. I ignored Upcoming for a year after my son was born and it kept growing. I did not write a line of code in a year and it got more popular."

That too seems intuitive, but building software in a way that makes it easy to offer rewards, prompts people to send out regular updates and helps them create good content for themselves on your site could be the difference between a good idea and a successful one. That's true for both the particular projects on Kickstarter and the site itself.

Games Are Good - But Make Sure Users' Goals Align With the Site's

Baio is a big fan of games. He likes iPhone games (his favorites include ZenBound, Eliss and Edge), he likes retro 8-bit style games and he likes the prospect of bringing game-like elements into non-gaming environments.

As a part of that thinking, Baio believes it's important to make sure that users' interests on a site align with the interests of the site itself. On Kickstarter, "success depends," he says, "on your ability to promote your work." And thus to promote the site as well.

The risk here is that a game-like system of rewards can change the way people behave in ways that aren't helpful. "Yahoo Answers, for example," Andy says, "got the point system totally wrong. They tuned it for traffic instead of for quality. People get points for offering any answer at all to questions, so you've got all these people just entering one word answers to loads of questions so they can climb the leader board."

Successful examples? Baio pointed to the UK Guardian's MP Expenses experiment, where readers are crowdsourcing analysis of hundreds of thousands of expense reports filed by members of Parliament and finding some pretty funny claims. That's similar to the Sunlight Foundation's Transparency Corps. (Check out that project's latest - a crowdsourced national directory of state-level elected officials on Twitter - cool!)

In systems like that, and especially in Baio's much-studied favorite Mechanical Turk, users "have full control over their choice of tasks. They turn work into a little bit of play."

Build to existing social connections, maintain engagement during the quiet spells in the middle of goal pursuit and make it like a game - but be careful how people play. That's some of Andy Baio's advice. You can begin to see it in action at Kickstarter.com. That site's full functionality will open to the public at the end of August.

Top photo by Jeremy Keith on Flickr.

Garage sales are no longer just for blue-haired grandmothers with teacup fetishes. While eBay and Etsy are great for selling rare or specialty items, setting up an auction or store for your mismatched cutlery might not get you the results you need. One blessing in this down economy is that we're learning to reclaim and recycle in a way that our grandmothers have been doing for years. Whether you like haggling over weird items on a Sunday or you'd simply like to list your own sale, here are some great resources.

2. GSALR: This site improves where Craigslist leaves off. While it does not offer images from sales, it does offer a map of the region, an RSS feed on new listings and a trip planner for multi-sale routes. Garage Sale Nation offers a similar tool, and the most results seem to appear in Massachusetts, Virginia, New York and Michigan.

Yard Sale Search: This site is extremely bare bones, but if you're just looking for a site to list all of the multi-family sales in your area, the results are quick and plentiful.

3. ZipGarage: ZipGarage is a site where garage sale hunters type in their postal code and receive results on sales in their area. RWW first wrote about ZipGarage in 2007. While this site is perhaps one of the best designed garage sale sites, it still lacks the users. If you're having a sale, you might still want to embed the widget to give directions to your users.

4. Upcoming and Facebook Events: Your friends DO want to buy your junk, or at the very least they want to spend Sunday drinking beer on your lawn. A great way to kick start a yard sale is to reach out to your online networks, prepare some sandwiches and treat the event like a lawn party. Upcoming and Facebook events offer great ways to announce localized events and the best part is that your friends are likely to get calendar reminders for your sale.

5. Twitter, Loopt: These location-based services are great for that last minute sale push or reminder. While nearby followers might not have planned to buy anything, if they're in the area, they just might stop by for an impulse purchase.

6.The Local Paper and Craigslist: We're sure you already know about these options, but if you're having a sale, it would be silly not to list here. With Craigslist, users can narrow their search by neighborhood and keyword, and choose to specify only those results that contain images.

*Final Tips for Sellers: After you've tweeted, listed and advertised your yard sale, remember that old school rules still apply. Some of the must-haves of a garage sales include ample signage, properly labeled tables, extra boxes and bags, a measuring tape for furniture and about $100 in small bills and quarters for change.

Bluetooth 3.0

This is one of the no-brainers on the list. The Bluetooth 3.0 specification will be released this year and devices will start to hit the shelves by 2010. At this point, it's expected that the 3.0 spec will include faster speeds, reportedly transferring files at 480 megabits per second in close proximity and 100 megabits per second at 10 meters. It will also feature an ultra-low-power mode that Gartner predicts will enable new peripherals, sensors, and applications, such as health monitoring. The technology will be backwards compatible, allowing old devices to communicate with new ones, so there's no reason for it not take off in the upcoming years.

Mobile User Interfaces + Mobile Web/Widgets

Mobile user interfaces and mobile web/widgets were listed separately, accounting for two items on the list, but we think they can be lumped together. They all point to how mobile computing is rapidly becoming a new platform for everything from consumer mobile apps to B2E (business-to-employee) and B2C (business-to-customer). (Gartner did not include B2B on their list.) Modern day smartphones like the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, the upcoming Pre, and others deliver better interfaces for browsing the web, thus making it accessible to more people. Widget-like applications, including those that replicate thin client technology, will become more common especially in B2C strategies. Yet the mobile web still has challenges ahead. For example, there are no standards for browser access to handset services like the camera or GPS, the report notes.

Location Awareness

Location sensing, powered by GPS as well as Wi-Fi and triangulation, opens up new possibilities for mobile social networking and presence applications. Technology's earliest adopters are already familiar with social networks like Brightkite and Loopt which let you reveal your location to a network of friends. But we're still on the tip of this iceberg. Take for example, the iPhone IM client Palringo, they're just now adding location services to their application. This allows users to see how far away their contacts are, introducing a whole new dimension to mobile communication. Over the next year or two, this sort of technology is expected to become more commonplace, but it will also raise questions about privacy. Will you want your network of online friends and acquaintances to really know your exact location? Will turning off location awareness signal that you're up to something sneaky (so asks the suspicious wife, husband, boss, etc.)? As a society, we will have to answer these questions and more in the near future.

Near Field Communication (NFC)

NFC is a technology that provides a way for consumers to use their mobile phones for making payments, among other things. It's something that has taken off in many countries worldwide, but certainly not all, and definitely not in the United States just yet. Unfortunately, Gartner predicts that the move towards mobile payment systems will still not occur this year or the next in mature markets like the U.S. and Western Europe. Instead, NFC is more likely to take off in emerging markets. Other uses of the technology, such as the ability to transfer photos from phone to digital photo frames, will also remain elusive to more developed markets.

802.11n & Cellular Broadband

802.11n, a specification for wireless local area networks (WLANs), initially gave us pause. Although not ratified as an official standard yet, the technology is already commonplace. However, until it "goes gold" so to speak, it won't really infiltrate the mobile world. Even the ubiquitous iPhone only supports 802.11 b/g at the moment. 

On the flip side, the other internet connection technology, cellular broadband, has the potential to make Wi-Fi almost unnecessary, at least for achieving high speeds. In addition to mobile phones, laptop makers will likely continue to incorporate this technology into their netbooks and notebooks using modern chipsets that provide superior performance to our current crop of add-on cards and dongles.

Display Technologies

Display technologies will also see improvements in the upcoming years. New technologies like active pixel displays, passive displays and pico projectors will have an impact. Pico projectors - the tiny portable projectors we saw being introduced at this year's CES - will enable new mobile use cases. Instant presentations in informal settings could become more common when there isn't large, cumbersome equipment to set up. The different types of display technologies introduced in 2009 and 2010 will become important differentiators between devices and will impact user selection criterion, says Gartner.

For more information on these above technologies, you can read through the full report available here on Gartner's web site.

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments on how you think the mobile space will be impacted in the future.