Now from Google+ to the iPad 2, the Occupy hashtag to the Kindle Fire,
new online tools and gadgets have kept the tech sector humming in 2011.
But along with the good and the great came the bad and the downright ugly.
It was a year that moved simply too fast for a few former titans of innovation.
Consider Kodak. Believe it or not, Eastman Kodak engineers invented the digital camera back in 1975,
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.
And there's also Cisco's flip video cam.
The once popular gadget had its shares of followers for its low price, ease of use, but was quickly superseded by the video cameras built into smartphones.
And finally, Blockbuster and Borders. Once upon a time, they were both meccas of home entertainment,
but online marketplaces like Amazon and Netflix have turned both into bankrupt has-beens.
So who's next?
And who else is struggling to keep pace with technology and could be the next to crumble?
Let's bring in our regular News Stream contributor, Nick Thompson, senior editor of the New Yorker.
He joins us now live from New York.
Hey, there, Nick.
Good morning, Christie.
And which companies do you think are under imminent threat thanks to technology?
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.
They just send e-mails. So we've seen [a] slowdown of service for them.
We've seen a continued decline in the record industry. That's an old trend.
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.
What we're seeing is that phones have become so powerful that you used to need lots of devices to do lots of things;
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.
We've seen a lot of trouble for Nintendo and Electronic Arts, because people are playing Zynga games or they're playing Angry Birds,
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.
So Nintendo and EA, they'd better watch out.
Now, Nick, what companies are potentially under threat, but we can't rule 'em out just yet?
Well, the most interesting one[s] to me are the large electronics manufacturers, right, so Sony, Samsung, Panasonic.
And they make all of these devices like DVD players, which will soon pretty much be obsolete as we stream,
or they used to make portable CD players which are now totally useless.
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.
So they might even... we don't know what's gonna happen to the television industry.
Will it still be profitable in a few years? It certainly wasn't a good business to be in last year.
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?
They've been booming recently. They're great. They're wonderful.
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?