At the beginning of this year, analyst firm Gartner released a report that highlights eight up-and-coming mobile technologies which they predict will impact the mobile industry over the course of the next two years. According to Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at the firm, the technologies they've identified will evolve quickly and will likely pose issues that will have to be addressed by short term strategies. Sponsor 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.

Digg and Revision3 co-founders Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson have provided crowdsourcing startup 3Crowd Technologies and its founder Barrett Lyon with an early Christmas present of funding. Lyon says the angel investors join Storm Ventures and Greenwich Technology Associates to "give 3Crowd the shot in the arm it needs to take off," likely sometime early next year. Sponsor This marks the second time Rose and Adelson have crossed paths with Lyon, who co-founded BitGravity , the streaming video service that Internet television studio Revision3 utilizes. San Mateo, California-based 3Crowd has yet to reveal how they plan to transform crowdsourcing (or how much funding they have secured), but Lyon's history and apparent entrepreneurial fervor to change the web has clearly excited 3Crowd's investors. "This concept is yet another disrupting, dis-intermediating idea from Barrett. These are the technologies that change the game," Adelson says. Lyon, who is also the subject of the forthcoming book Fatal System Error by Joseph Menn, says that while the Internet has provided the platform for much success, it is still imperfect and needs to change. "At this point, my goal is to make change - to take the Internet in its current form (resembling digital duct tape) and transform it into something stronger and more scalable," Lyon says. Before co-founding BitGravity, Lyon created the Opte Project : "software that traced all the routes of the Internet," he says. Images from Opte Project have been used in movies, books and are permanently on display in museums of art and science in both New York and Boston. Discuss

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Digg's Rose, Adelson Back Crowdsourcing Startup 3Crowd

The downturn certainly hasn't made getting a term sheet an easy endeavor. Many early-stage companies have chosen to forgo traditional investment in favor of participating in incubator programs . This trend is exactly why the TechStars mentorship program is expanding to yet another city. The program just announced plans to launch a Seattle program in the fall of 2010. Sponsor Under the direction of entrepreneur and partner in Seattle's Founders Co-op Andy Sack, 10 lucky startups will receive seed funding and sage advice from a team of established mentors . Based in Boulder, Boston and soon Seattle, TechStars teams receive $6000 dollars per founder for a maximum of 3 founders. From here, the program claims a 6% equity stake in your company and trains you to run a sustainable startup. Some well known program graduates include location-based network Brightkite , Twitter app store oneforty and surveillance service ReTel Technologies . Seattle program participants will benefit from the successes of past graduates as well as hear from entrepreneurs and investors including Managing Director of Voyager Capital Erik Benson, CEO of

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TechStars Expands to Seattle

Trying to understand the basics of cloud computing is one matter but getting a grasp on the technologies across the different platforms is another issue entirely. To try and simplify things just a bit, Appirio is offering a map that shows the cloud ecosystem . The map breaks out 70 different layers of technology across applications, platforms and infrastructure. The map is pretty sophisticated with the ability to drill down to understand the underlying technologies. Sponsor

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A Map To Better Understand The Cloud Ecosystem...And The Hype