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Now from Google+ to the iPad 2, the Occupy hashtag to the Kindle Fire,

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new online tools and gadgets have kept the tech sector humming in 2011.

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But along with the good and the great came the bad and the downright ugly.

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It was a year that moved simply too fast for a few former titans of innovation.

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Consider Kodak. Believe it or not, Eastman Kodak engineers invented the digital camera back in 1975, 

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but it has failed to keep pace with the rise of digital photography. The once great company is now a shutter click away from bankruptcy.

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And there's also Cisco's flip video cam. 

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The once popular gadget had its shares of followers for its low price, ease of use, but was quickly superseded by the video cameras built into smartphones.

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And finally, Blockbuster and Borders. Once upon a time, they were both meccas of home entertainment,

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but online marketplaces like Amazon and Netflix have turned both into bankrupt has-beens.

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So who's next?

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And who else is struggling to keep pace with technology and could be the next to crumble?

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Let's bring in our regular News Stream contributor, Nick Thompson, senior editor of the New Yorker.

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He joins us now live from New York.

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Hey, there, Nick.

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Good morning, Christie.

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And which companies do you think are under imminent threat thanks to technology?

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Well, you know, one of the interesting things we've seen here in the United States is that actually the postal service is under imminent threat because nobody sends mail anymore. 

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They just send e-mails. So we've seen [a] slowdown of service for them.

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We've seen a continued decline in the record industry. That's an old trend. 

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One of the new things that's so interesting, it combines the first two companies you talked about. You talked about Flip being killed off by phones. 

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What we're seeing is that phones have become so powerful that you used to need lots of devices to do lots of things; 

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now you really just need your phones to do all these things. So, an industry under threat [is] handheld video games and video game manufacturers. 

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We've seen a lot of trouble for Nintendo and Electronic Arts, because people are playing Zynga games or they're playing Angry Birds, 

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and they're playing [them] on their mobile devices. So that industry is under threat in a way we've seen other industries in the past.

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So Nintendo and EA, they'd better watch out. 

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Now, Nick, what companies are potentially under threat, but we can't rule 'em out just yet?

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Well, the most interesting one[s] to me are the large electronics manufacturers, right, so Sony, Samsung, Panasonic. 

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And they make all of these devices like DVD players, which will soon pretty much be obsolete as we stream, 

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or they used to make portable CD players which are now totally useless. 

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So the question is whether they can transition into making new devices which are totally relevant a couple years from now because they're gonna lose their old businesses.

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So they might even... we don't know what's gonna happen to the television industry. 

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Will it still be profitable in a few years? It certainly wasn't a good business to be in last year.

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So those manufacturers are gonna be in a lot of trouble. And I'm very interested in watching them. Another one is GPS makers, right? 

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They've been booming recently. They're great. They're wonderful. 

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But will Garmin really have a place once the GPS in your cell phone is as good as the GPS in your old GPS watch?
