According to a recent study by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, companies less than five years old generated nearly two-thirds of the new jobs created in the U. S. in 2007. But what’s even more important is that without these startups more jobs would be lost than created, the U. S. economy would permanently shrink and America would eventually lose its superpower status, simple as that.

This is because big companies grow by increasing scale and productivity, which is to say by reducing the number of jobs per unit of sales, while startups grow by inventing cool stuff. See the difference?

The startups that most reliably become giant American corporations and creators of wealth are technology startups. Without startups to compete with or acquire, big technology companies would do almost nothing new. In the United States large companies depend on startups to explore new technologies and new markets. Startups play a particularly important role in growing jobs out of a recession. New companies produced all of the net new jobs in the U. S. from 2001-2007, and also from 1980-1983, the last big American downturn.

Why then, has U. S. economic policy been aimed almost entirely at saving large and dying industries (banks and car companies)? Because sometimes even Presidents don’t get it.

U. S. technology startups are born and die at astounding rates. Ninety-five percent of technology startups fail — ninety-five percent. With odds at 19-to-1 against success, why do entrepreneurs even bother to build these companies? Because the potential rewards are huge (Microsoft and Apple, Cisco and Intel were all startups, remember) and for real entrepreneurs there are some things even worse than failure, like boredom or being like everyone else.

American technology startups change the world all the time and are this country’s primary global advantage, though hardly anyone understands that. Encouraging technology startups is the key to keeping America competitive and prosperous, though hardly anyone does that. Technology startups succeed despite these adversities because Americans are full of ideas, startups are so darned fun to do, and they don’t have to cost that much, either — sometimes nothing at all.

Technology export sales drive the U. S. economy and technology startups drive U. S. industry, yet in this era of too-big-to-die companies hardly anyone knows about or understands this phenomenon. The experts are supposed to be the venture capitalists of Silicon Valley and Boston, but they don’t really know what they are doing. VC returns are way down for a variety of reasons mainly coming back to the same greed and stupidity we’ve been seeing at work in other financial markets.

Something needs to be done, then, to encourage America to restart itself, and I’m just the guy to try it.

Announcing the Cringely 2010 (Not in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour.

Starting next month I will be accepting from readers nominations for interesting startup companies in six general categories — biotech, energy, entertainment, information technology, materials, and transportation.  Over the course of about six weeks we will examine and discuss as a community these nominated companies of which I am hoping there will be hundreds, primarily not from Silicon Valley or any other tech hotbeds.  I’ll have some assistance in this process from the Kauffman Foundation.

Together we’ll whittle the number down to 24 then come June I will set off with my family in our RV to visit all 24.  We’ll camp in the parking lot or in the driveway of the CEO and spend a couple days at each startup, learning about the company, the people, their technology and their market.  I’ll take with me a small camera crew and we’ll produce what will begin with a summer of blogging and end with a 13-part TV reality series

That’s my plan for restarting America and I hope you’ll be along for the ride.  Look for details soon, but no nominations yet, please.

First reports of the attack blamed a security flaw in an attached PDF file. Later reports blamed a vulnerability in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. Adobe denies the PDF vulnerability, though the company not long ago issued a security patch for that product. Microsoft confirmed the IE vulnerability. But what’s interesting to me is that I understand from inside Google that the company plans to respond to this Chinese threat by changing its log-in process for web apps to one using a secure secondary server. That’s great, but it wouldn’t have stopped the most recent attack.

Is there something here we aren’t being told?

The most popular secure secondary server access system is called SiteKey and is used by Bank of America and many other financial institutions. The way SiteKey works is you log on to your bank’s computer, for example, by first typing an account identifier which causes one server to generate a picture and another server to generate a pass phrase which together don’t identify you to the bank but rather identifies the bank to you. Trapped as it is in a hash table, nobody at the bank can even tell you what picture you chose but you know it (the pass phrase too) so you can be pretty sure the server you are logging into is the one you want and not some phishing site. If the picture and phrase are satisfactory you can then type in your real password and you are there.

I’m told that Google will soon roll-out a similar system for Google Apps.

But I can’t see how using secure secondary authentication would have had any impact at all on the recent Chinese malware incident.

So I went to a friend who manages data security for a huge defense contractor and he agreed. “Authentication helps, ” he said, “but that was the second part of the attack, the original piece was a carefully crafted PDF file that was executed by the user. No amount of authentication helps against an authorized user. Don’t get me wrong, I am a believer in strong X. 509 based authentication, just it would not have helped against a malicious attachment.”

Adobe says it wasn’t a PDF problem at all. Yet my friend, who is privy to a flow of information the rest of us are not, says Adobe may be technically incorrect in this assertion.  I don’t know for sure, nor do I think it really matters in this case.

“The IE use was a secondary effect (to download the malware using an allowed program), ” he explained. “I’m not sure what they are calling a vulnerability (it might be a feature). The initial vector was the PDF. Typically such an attack is limited in just how large a program can be in the initial attack (hidden inside the attachment).  It has to be just enough to pull the real root kit. Early ones used their own network app but most systems are now protected by personal firewalls that would disallow or alarm. Use of IE would probably avoid this (and explains why large corporations are going to gateway white lists). Bottom line: the attack requires an executable program to be running on the workstation. Once that is in place, anything can be done. ”

The best defense against this sort of attack would have been two-fold. First, strip all e-mail attachments from messages and replace them with a URL. Send one copy of the attachment to a dedicated server that can be set to paranoid. Take as much time as needed to vet the attachment including emulation to see if it is malware or not. Once complete, the URL embedded with the forwarded e-mail becomes active and the attachment can be downloaded.

Google owns Postini, which could implement just such a technique, so we should probably expect that they will do so, making Google apps more secure and therefore more attractive in the process.  In Google’s move to make itself ever more essential to the net they may well offer such a quarantine service as a standalone product, too.

The second part of this solution unfortunately died with Windows Vista — the hated User Access Control (UAC). Temporary privilege escalation with logging, which is what Vista’s UAC provided along with some user grief, is the way to go.

Remember that all the authentication in the world will not protect against a privileged user doing the wrong thing. It’s just that logging may help to determine what happened after the fact.

We have known for years how to fix this, but nobody cared.

The FY2011 federal proposed budget will be published with the following changes:

– NASA’s Constellation program to replace the Space Shuttle will be cancelled and all hardware development will be stopped including Ares 1, Ares 5 and Orion.

– There is no real post-ISS program. Maybe something will happen past 2020 but that is for the next administration to figure out.

Where NASA goes other space agencies will follow (the Europeans, Indians, even the Russians, possibly leaving only the Chinese still headed to the Moon). The Moon is out as a destination, considered by some as too hard and others as too boring. Over the next two years we will see a serious drop-off in interest expressed by various groups (like the Google Lunar X-Prize effort).

This has happened before: back in 1990s everybody was into Mars missions (NASA, other government agencies and private groups). When NASA lost interest in Mars around 2001-03 and turned to Moon other nations followed.

On one hand this pending announcement is terribly disappointing. There is a very high chance that we will see an end to U. S. human spaceflight within the next few years. But it was probably inevitable. NASA is too screwed up to do anything else without a major restructuring and that would require spending too much Presidential capital in this terrible economy.

My Moon mission, of course, is still on.

Were the tweets from a real beta tester? While many readers thought they weren’t, I’m pretty sure they were, primarily based on what many perceived as mistakes. Yes, the price points were off but those things can change hour-by-hour right up to the last minute and I wouldn’t put it past Apple to deliberately give bad pricing to testers to mislead and catch leaks. More importantly, the Twitterer said there would be three price points and there were. Based on the iPhone/iTouch intro model one would only have expected two price points.

Let’s look inside this price differential for a moment and try to channel our inner Steve Jobs. The Twitterer said $599, $699, and $799 while Apple announced $499, $599, and $699 without 3G and $629, $729, and $829 for the same models with 3G. But remember the Twitterer was strictly referring to 3G models, since he said they had 3G. He also mentioned both AT&T and Verizon Wireless, while Apple mentioned only AT&T.

Just because Apple didn’t mention Verizon doesn’t mean they won’t also offer 3G service from Verizon. The word “exclusive” was never used referring to AT&T. They trotted-out that pre-paid plan, but it would be crazy for carriers to not also offer a one-year or two-year subscription plan, too, which would drop the unit price somewhat. Maybe the subscription rates weren’t yet set. More likely the Verizon details were still in some limbo or Apple gave AT&T an exclusive presence at the intro in exchange for some concession we may never know about.

With Steve Jobs the deal isn’t done until it is done so I am sure he’s still trying to take one or both carriers to the cleaners.

Which brings us back to that price, which was $30 higher than predicted by the Twitterer. Remember Apple dropped iPhone prices almost immediately after the units started shipping. I don’t think this pricing is set in stone, either.  Maybe the $30 is padding they’ll drop at the intro to make us feel good.  Parts experts say 3G chips now cost around $7, so including one hardly adds $130 to the price or even $100.

Another point brought up against the Twitterer was the battery life (he said three hours, Apple said 10 hours). Reality in the PC and mobile industries is that a 10 hour battery life really means six hours. You may get 100 percent of the advertised battery life, but I don’t. My little Dell Vostro A90 (more on that in a day or so) is supposed to be good for six hours but the little battery meter always tells me on a full charge that I have 3:25 to go. There’s simply no way that iPad, no matter what the processor, is good for a real 10 hours of continuous use. And remember this is the non-3G version they are touting, while the Twitterer was clearly using 3G.

An iPod Touch with Wifi turned on lasts a lot longer than a comparable iPhone with WiFi turned off. In real life I’m pretty sure a 3G iPad IS a 2-3 hour device. And what’s wrong with that?

Finally, where were the split-view camera and the gimmicky solar charger? According to EnGadget the split-view cam is mentioned in the iPad SDK as “iPad-only” and some iPad apps ask you to take pictures without giving you the capability to do so…. yet. I’m sure the camera is coming. As for the solar charger, who’s to say that won’t come shortly, too?

In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if both features are present when the iPad finally ships in 60 days along with iPhone 4.0 software, which many expected to be part of yesterday’s announcement.

I was disappointed by the lack of iPhone 4.0 because this kind of device really needs true multi-tasking. I’m sure we will see it soon. What I am not at all sure about but wish we’d see soon is support for Adobe’s Flash. What does Steve Jobs have against Adobe, anyway? He used to love Adobe chairman John Warnock. There’s some weird daddy thing going on there with Apple’s rejection of Flash and I am tired of it. This new processor is plenty fast enough to support Flash and HTML 5 is still not ready for prime time.

Correction — Here’s a more informed view of the Flash situation from a friend.  it’s hard to argue with his numbers:

“I did a quickie test with the new YouTube HTML5 beta. On a site that embedded a video (so Flash was used), my browser CPU utilization was 22%, and the Adobe Flash plug-in CPU utilization was 55%. (dual core macbook pro, so total CPU% = 200%).

After the video played, I watched the same video again directly on the YouTube site in HTML5. Adobe Flash plug-in CPU utilization was 4% (what it consumes just sitting on its hiney), and the browser CPU utilization was 17%.

77% vs 21%. that’s why Apple hates Adobe. There certainly may be personalities involved (with Jobs, there is always something personal), but Adobe Flash is just technically awful (this actually may be the crux of any Jobs’ hatred – he hates inelegance, and Adobe Flash is inelegant).

I don’t hate Adobe, and it does bother met that I can’t see Flash on the iPhone or iPad, but Adobe has acted very awfully in this area and doesn’t appear to be doing anything to address it. Google and Apple have the muscle to squeeze them out.”

Now we return you to Bob, already in progress:

The apps were underwhelming to me with the exception of iPhoto, but maybe that requires waiting for iPhone 4, too. Overall the product felt rushed. But knowing Steve a little bit I think he’s seeing this as a two-part intro and there will be another event around the shipping date, supposedly 60 days from now, which he’ll correctly view as yet another marketing opportunity. At that event we’ll see 3G from more than just AT&T, we’ll hear about more data plans including subsidized plans that will drop the price by $200. We’ll see the split-view camera, iPhone 4.0, and maybe even that little solar charger.

As presented yesterday the iPad was cool and I’ll probably buy one, but not right away. Fortunately many people will buy them right away then buy them again when the update equivalent to 3G (4G? HD?) comes along, just as they did with the original 2G iPone and the original 128K Mac.  So I am sure the iPad will be at least a modest success, even in its initial incarnation. But you know what it feels like to me with it’s hype followed by an underwhelming reality? It feels like another Segway, which sure hasn’t changed the way people move on the Earth.

Apple tablet is OLED + back has solar pad for recharging, but (the charger) really doesn’t work quickly. More a gimmick. Verizon+att, wifi yes!

Apple Tablet has thumbpads on each side for mouse gestures, reads fingerprint for security. Up to 5 profiles by fingerprint for family.

Yes, there are 2cameras: one in front and one in back (or it may be one with some double lens) so you record yourself and in front of you.

I can tell u the battery life is great in ebook reading mode but not great when on wifi or playing games. 2-3hrs.

Yes, the apple tablet is running an iphone os flavor with ability to have multiple apps running at same time (ie pandora, browser).

The price will be $599, $699 and $799 depending on size and memory in apple tablet. Also, wireless keyboard + monitor connection for TV.

Also, the apple tablet is really amazing for newspapers. Video conferencing is super stable, but nothing new.

The best part of the apple tablet as beta user has been the built in HDTV tuner and pvr, and the chess game.

Yes, it’s true… I’ve been beta testing the Apple tablet for the past two weeks and it’s amazing!

It won’t.

I was talking not long ago with editorial folks at an unnamed media company that rhymes with “The New York Times.” There was some possibility of my blogging over there. They were intrigued, but couldn’t fit it into their grand plan, at least not right away. The problem was resources were already allocated and such an endeavor takes months to mount and costs tens of thousands of dollars.

No it doesn’t, and that’s the problem with Big Media.

When I was at PBS we did occasional redesigns and I never knew what they cost because for most of my 11 years there I was just a paid contributor. But toward the end of my tenure I became a producer which means I was finally exposed to budgets and was, to some extent, even responsible for paying some of them. And I was shocked to learn that my final design for a Moveable Type blog over there did, indeed, cost tens of thousands of dollars — many tens of thousands of dollars.

PBS isn’t a company that rhymes with “The New York Times” but it still qualifies as Big Media, so the pricing was more or less confirmed.

Now look at the screen you are reading right now, my Wordpress blog at cringely.com. It cost me NOTHING to design. I did it myself in a single night with the help of an experienced and generous friend, Benjamin Higginbotham of Spacevidcast.com. This blog is hosted by Media Temple in Los Angeles and costs me $50 per month, which is a lot compared to most blogs, but then I’m getting more than a million page-views per month. One more Christmas card or IBM column and I might bump up to $100 per month just to get some more resources, but I think I’ve made my point: a good Internet media product doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. This is my living, remember, that’s putting three kids through school. What are my gross margins — 10,000 percent?

While those are my gross margins they aren’t the gross margins at PBS or at a company that rhymes with “The New York Times.” Those outfits have overhead I don’t. They have legacy relationships and obligations I can’t even imagine. They can’t just go from there to here in an instant even if they wanted to.

Which brings us back to the iSomething to be introduced tomorrow. No matter how great it is, it can’t support the legacy infrastructure of Big Media, which includes mid-town office buildings and business lunches (hence my picture of New York’s 21 Club, if you hadn’t already figured that out).

Big Media wants revenue approaching what they could charge if a web site was a printed magazine. Remember the original lure of the Internet for publishers was the idea that there would be more profit without the expenses of printing and distribution. But it didn’t work out that way because Internet users won’t generally pay for content.

But Apple has the mojo. Steve Jobs has been firm from the start that content should be paid for and his generally is, except of course for my podcast on iTunes. Big Media likes the way Steve thinks.  And so they can with one breath condemn him for killing the music album, yet in a second breath they can see him as the savior of magazines, newspapers, and good-but-thinly-watched TV series.

And Apple CAN be that savior, but only after a rationalization and severe downsizing of Big Media overhead, which I am not at all sure Big Media is really ready to do.

Based on the rumors I’ve heard so far I’m guessing the new Apple product will be — like the Apple TV — a hobby, a critical success but a business failure, though one with enough potential that Apple will give it a few years to succeed. It’s in giving those few years where Apple really can save Big Media, which will undoubtedly by then be not so big.

But wait a minute, isn’t Nokia the big Kahuna in this space and aren’t they right now suing the heck out of Apple? Yes, but that’s an act of desperation, a stalling tactic intended just to slow Apple down or, possibly, send some useful license revenue from Cupertino to Finland. It doesn’t change the inevitable.

So-called “feature phones” are going away, to be replaced within two product cycles (three years, tops) entirely by smart phones driven by mobile app stores and the need for carriers to generate additional revenue. It’s not like you’ll even be able to find a feature phone to buy.

The smart phone marketplace will consolidate around three operating systems — Android, Blackberry, and OS X. Though there will be some ups and down in the market and the complete transition will take longer to complete than my usual 12-month timeline, Symbian, Windows Phone, and every other smart phone OS that isn’t from Apple, Google, or RIM, are likely to die or be reduced to insignificance.

None of these platforms expect to die, but that’s the way it is with these things. You don’t expect to lose until you’ve lost, generally.

On some level Nokia even thinks it still has a chance to win the war, but it doesn’t.

Nokia has faith in its very popular cross-platform application development environment, Qt, which it acquired in 2008 with the $153 million acquisition of Norwegian company Trolltech, father of Qt. Nokia sees Qt as its secret sauce — a potent weapon against Apple.

Qt, like any of a number of 4GLs can write once and deploy a lot of places. Where Qt is different from the other 4GLs (in the mind of Nokia at least) is that it manages to do what it does without killing app performance, probably because Qt began as a mobile product and mobile apps have to be lean and fast.

So Qt is growing up at just the time applications and OSes are growing down, thanks to OS X and the iPhone. Qt has made notable progress supporting 3D apps and a huge variety of processors, chipsets, and GPUs. They showed at CES the same apps running from the same source on a ton of different hardware platforms from handsets to desktops to set top boxes. And now Nokia has reportedly done the unthinkable, which is to rewrite Maemo, its Linux, in Qt.

Meanwhile, Apple has been rolling forward with its PA Semi strategy, the first fruit of which we’ll apparently see announced next week. I sense that Apple is headed toward a family of devices from handhelds to servers all linked to a cloud and ostensibly running the same OS. Apple is mining the ARM ecosystem for this move in addition to its own PA Semi extensions.

Nokia thinks that, through either Qt or various legal moves (or both), it can slow Apple’s mobile juggernaut. They won’t, and here’s why.

Apple hires the meanest lawyers it can find, paying extra bucks for that “kick them for good measure” attitude. I know a company that had long legal battles with both Microsoft and Apple and they said Apple’s legal team was far worse than Microsoft’s, hands down. So while Nokia’s appeal to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to punish Apple, is an act of desperation, Apple’s similar response is just the way they do these things.

This legal situation is going to get uglier and uglier but in the end it will be settled with patent cross-licensing, no monetary damages or license fees, and Nokia feeling relieved to get out of the negotiating room alive.

This will happen, I believe, because Apple doesn’t really give a damn about Qt or Nokia. They care much more about Google and Microsoft.

Nokia is going to fail in using Qt and Symbian to compete with Android or iPhone application frameworks because Nokia just doesn’t understand software. Nokia is a hardware company that does software and hardware companies aren’t fighting this new war, they just build the weapons.

Remember Apple is a software company that sells its products in an expensive hardware box.

Ultimately (more than 12 months from now) there will be a shakeout and Nokia will drop Symbian and even Maemo in favor of Google’s Android and Nokia custom apps, UI, and hardware.

Meanwhile Microsoft will cut its rumored (and incredibly expensive) iPhone search deal with Apple, then it will introduce Windows Phone 7, which will fail to gain market traction for Redmond. Microsoft will ultimately align with Apple to avoid the embarrassment of working with Google, but this alignment will be solely for mobile.

That is unless Microsoft buys RIM and then doesn’t screw it up.

Top management at IBM has nearly always come from the sales side of the business and it is that sales side that has been outdoing itself quarter after quarter helping IBM earnings to grow even in a recession. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that lots of IBM revenue comes from its international operations and has benefited from a weak dollar. But a fair amount of this success — at least on the services side — comes from very aggressively bidding for work.

But what happens if your bid is too low to actually make money for the company? At IBM, ironically, that’s not a problem for the sales people. It is a problem for the people charged with actually performing the services.

According to IBM customers I have spoken to, the company seems unable to create a solution and put a price to it that anyone would accept so the sales organization appears to sell almost anything at whatever price they can get. They collect their commission and move on to the next deal, leaving behind a mess for the service organization to deal with.

Dealing in this case means cutting costs to the point where the contract is profitable even if not truly fulfilled. Because there is such a big disconnect between the price of the contract and the cost needed to deliver it, crazy things are done, starting with offshoring on a massive scale.

While offshoring is not intrinsically bad, it leaves almost nobody working in the data centers, which are necessarily back in the U.S. When the server folks are thousands of miles from the equipment, how does the equipment get installed? Who does the hands-on work? If a machine breaks, how long does it take to get someone there to fix it?  IBM customers are learning the rueful answers to these questions.

IBM is also building several new “global delivery centers.” One of these is in Dubuque, Iowa. Why Dubuque? It is my understanding that IBM hopes to reduce its labor costs and one way to do this is by choosing remote locations like Dubuque with few locals who could qualify to be IBM techs or engineers. Experienced IBMers being downsized in places like New York won’t move to Dubuque, so they can be replaced with cheaper (and younger) labor. Dubuque’s lack of native talent means IBM can staff the centers with mostly foreign H1-B personnel, again so they can pay them less and have no long-term benefits exposure.

I find it difficult to see how customers benefit from these global delivery centers.

But wait, there’s more! The offshoring, the spin off of network work to AT&T, the “global centers,” the new internal processes are not much compared to the latest IBM ploy I’ve heard about — the use of used equipment. To save money on its outsourcing contracts, I have been told that IBM is refurbishing old equipment and substituting it for new. The customer pays a service/lease rate for new, but in the IBM data center what’s actually in the rack is used hardware. Since IBM holds the title and lease and customers never visit the data centers anyway, the customers don’t know.

Only I guess now they do know.

If I was an IBM customer leasing hardware that was represented as new I’d darned well want to verify that’s the case. Send somebody to the data center and check serial numbers. What can it hurt? You might save some money on the contract or score some new equipment or both. It’s worth a shot.

Corporate America will tolerate a lot of this kind of behavior, but there are limits, especially when deadlines are consistently missed and deliverables fail to perform as promised. That’s why I predict troubles for IBM in 2010 with customer satisfaction.

Take a look at that contract, Mr. or Ms. CFO (not the CIO — he or she sometimes can’t be trusted in these things), verify the number of machines and bodies that are supposed to be involved. If IBM is using only half the promised labor or half the promised hardware (or both) then raise some Hell.

Remember, it’s your money.

Here’s word from a friend of mine — a smart phone whore — who had a Nexus One for a month and didn’t tell me until this morning. Still, his reactions are informed and represent a month of experience. “I’m not too impressed with it as a phone, ” says my friend. “It’s basically a wash. Google is screw’n it big time with the horrible plans they are dishing it out on t-Mobile and the price is ridiculous. To beat all, it’s radio is horrible, so bad that I literally gave it back and returned to a clunky G1. There is no decent smart phone out right now except the Moto Cliq unless you are lucky enough to have good AT&T coverage with an iPhone, which I don’t.”

Early Nexus One users hate the phone, hate the plans, hate the network, hate the price, but what they hate most of all is Google’s lack of customer service. Shouldn’t Google have seen this coming? Of course, but the company operates in a bubble that market realities often can’t penetrate. Eventually Google will be good at this stuff, but how long will that take? Too long?

What amazes me is the bad radio given that this is an HTC product and HTC is a very good mobile phone manufacturer. Taking a guess about what’s happening there I predict that HTC warned Google about the radio problem but there were so many IQ points jetting around the conference room at Google that nobody bothered to actually listen they were so much in love with each other. Sometimes just being smarter is not enough. In fact just being smarter is never enough, even at chess – a lesson Google will have to learn the hard way, I suppose.

Now to China where hackers or spies or who-knows-who have been attacking Google and the search giant is threatening to take its ball and go home, leaving completely the Chinese market. What sense does this make? It makes no sense to me. Google is going to have zero impact on China — zero — by abandoning that market, which Microsoft and Yahoo will gladly fill. so threatening to walk away is simply stupid.

Of course Google couches all this in terms of rejecting Chinese government censorship, which is a good thing, but we’re still left with either posturing that isn’t real or stupid-ass behavior that is real but shows this isn’t likely to be the Google Decade after all.

Here’s a better approach for Google to take. Stand in front of a bank of cameras and microphones my very impressive friend Tiffany Montague (Google’s link with NASA, keeper of the Google G-V parking spaces at Moffett Field, and internal space expert) to have her explain how Google is going to launch a satellite Internet service similar to one I described in a recent column, specifically to bring freedom of information (and advertising) to totalitarian regimes everywhere.

The technology exists, Google could finance it, and China couldn’t stop it.

This assumes, of course, that Google has some guts, which I doubt.

Otherwise, 2010 looks like a good year for Google mainly because Internet advertising will recover somewhat and Google should make some progress in phones, browsers, operating systems, apps, and the cloud in general. In those areas they are still ahead of the curve and ahead of the curve is a great place to be.

Over the past years Apple has brought out successively better and ever more solid versions of OS X. They’ve completed a transition from PowerPC to Intel processors that could have killed a lesser company. They’ve built a dominant line of professional apps and a competitive line of productivity apps, pricing them reasonably compared to Microsoft. They re-invented the media player and the smart phone. They revolutionized the record business. And having once vilified the very idea of Apple stores, they changed their minds and showed the world how stores ought to be run. The company is absolutely at the top of its game despite a CEO who was absent for months near death. How do you top that?

In 2010 you do so by entering new markets and turning on old friends, sometimes simultaneously. That’s likely to be the case with the coming iSlate tablet, or whatever it will be called, which definitely won’t be running exclusively on AT&T. You can see that from AT&T’s sudden embrace of Android, which never would have happened if Steve Jobs hadn’t first made a preemptive move of his own for the iSlate, probably to Verizon.  The Apple/AT&T marriage is now one of convenience only.

The iSlate (or whatever) will be Steve’s idea of a new category of computing, or at least that’s the way he’ll spin it. Not an ebook reader, not a tablet computer, not a pen computer, not a handheld, not a smart phone, the iSlate will be something else and I’d say that something will depend on: a) the content deals Apple can announce, and; b) whatever Steve decides to claim for the product, whether actually true or not.

So expect lots of print deals for newspapers, magazines, and books. Expect, too, audio and video deals for the iSlate. Expect some major UI gimmick too, because that’s always at the heart of one of these advances. “It isn’t an MP3 player! It’s an AAC player with this tuning wheel thingee!! ” See what I mean?

Apple will under-promise and over-deliver for the iSlate. And if for some reason they don’t, then they’ll just declare it to be a hobby, like the AppleTV.

Apple as a content company will move into subscription music based on its recent Lala Media acquisition, but don’t think this embracing of streaming means Apple will be abandoning downloads, no sirree. Remember that while Hulu, for example, has been making a lot of news delivering streamed TV and movies, Apple has been making a lot of profit downloading both for sale and rental.

The downloading-streaming-downloading pendulum is about to turn direction, I think, with the advent of true 1080p video on the net. Years ago no network was fast enough for high fidelity streaming audio, much less streaming video, so everything was downloaded. Then networks got faster and people streamed. Then video came along (and Bit Torrent) and people downloaded again. That’s when iTunes rose to power for those of us who actually pay our bills. Then YouTube made streaming again popular. But now 1080p files are just so darned big that downloading is, again, where it’s at.

So what does that say about Apple’s vaunted rejection of Blu-Ray disks? I’ve maintained in the past that Apple refused to offer Blu-Ray as part of its agenda to take control of downloadable HD video standards. and I think I was right. But here’s news: Apple’s new line of iMacs were supposed to ship with Blu-Ray drives, but didn’t. What gives with that? Maybe it was a technical glitch, maybe a last minute pricing problem, maybe Steve didn’t get enough blood or flesh from some corporate partner (Sony). But I think it means that the fight over HD was won by Apple to the extent that they feel they can start listening again to their professional customers from the video industry who have been screaming for Blu-Ray.

So look for Blu-Ray drives to start appearing, shortly, in Apple computers along with Blu-Ray support in all of Apple’s professional applications. Look also for Apple to offer some higher level of HD download, probably with expanded device portability courtesy of Disney’s new KeyChest technology, which I am sure came from Apple.

And then there’s the iPhone. The iSlate will be a bigger iPhone, but in 2010 we’ll surely see at least two next-gen iPhones, too — a smaller form factor in the Nano tradition and a 1 GHz processor on something like the current model. Apple will remain atop the smart phone market, where Android may eventually threaten, but not yet.  As we see from the first Nexus One reviews, Google has a lot to learn.

More about Google and the Nexus One tomorrow, as well as an interesting theory about Apple and Nokia.