The 50 best inventions of 2009

From a rocket of the future to a $10 million lightbulb, here are TIME's picks for the best new gadgets and breakthrough ideas of the year

Google Chrome OS

Google Wave iPhone App Hits The App Store … Temporarily

Do a search for Google Wave on the App Store from your iPhone or desktop client, and you’ll see an application called just that pop up, ready to be installed as soon as you fork over $0.99. By Robin Wauters.

Salesforce Jumps Into Collaboration Software With Chatter

Salesforce.com Chief Executive Marc Benioff has never been shy about borrowing a bit of other companies’ mojo. On Nov, 18, he introduced the software company’s latest product, a business collaboration tool that takes pages from the playbooks of Facebook and Twitter. By Aaron Ricadela

Google Testing a Permanent Search Sidebar

According to Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search product and user experience, Google is looking to streamline its search experience.

What's So Unbearable about Working at Google New York?



Despite its celebrity chefs and razor scooters, Google's New York office houses a surprisingly disgruntled workforce. By Ryan Tate

VideoLobby Wants To Help You Create Your Own Custom-Branded Live Webcasts



VideoLobby, a new service founded by Peter Urban that’s looking to make it easier to create professional-looking webcasts, complete with custom branding.

Qwisk Brings Your Social Networks To The Browser



Qwisk, is an innovative new way to add a social twist to your browser.

Augmented Reality Is Both a Fad and the Future -- Here's Why



Why layering data on top of smartphones and computer screens is both a fad and the future. By Farhad Manjoo

Microsoft Still Chasing the Competition With IE9

Serious work has begun on Internet Explorer 9, the next revision of Microsoft’s flagship web browser. By Scott Gilbertson

Google OS: the end of the hard drive?

Google today unveiled more details of Chrome OS, a lightweight, browser-based operating system for netbooks. By Dylan F. Tweney

Do You Poken?

The pokenverse is a free service to manage and engage with your contacts over time. it's simple, interactive, and it will revolutionize the way you socialize.

Turn your iPhone camera into a translator



PicTranslator is only $1.99 and includes translation from your choice of one of the 16 supported languages.

Track your tweets the way you want



Clockwork's Tweetwally is a Twitter power tool, a way to save and customize search results and present them in different formats—at a specific URL (your own, or at tweetwally.com), on a projector (at a conference, party or other gathering), or on an iPhone.

How to record your mobile, landline and internet telephone calls

Interviews are the cornerstone of a journalist's arsenal and with many more interviews happening over the phone, journalists need some way to record them. Whether its a landline, mobile phone, or internet telephone service, here are a few ways to record your phone calls. By 10,000 Words

Datamasher

The Federal Government produces an immeasurable amount of data each day. DataMasher helps citizens have a little fun with those data by creating mashups to visualize them in different ways and see how states compare on important issues.

ThirdPresence

Publish your content on any mobile device with a web-based SaaS platform that enables you to distribute your media content to any multimedia-capable mobile phone.

Organize your flow of information



A real-time collaboration environment that helps teams organize the flow of information, talk things over and work together towards common goals seamlessly on the web.

Google Serves Up Free Wi-Fi at 47 Airports for the Holidays



Holiday season air travel just got a little less crappy—freebie access starts today, and runs through to January 15, 2010. By Danny Allen

How to Make Employees Social Media Ambassadors

As companies start to dip their toes into the social media waters, we have seen them implement a couple of different approaches. By SpankyGirl

Top 15 Brands Social Media Presence

The Top 15 Brands as decided by Interbrands. By Social Media Optimization

Three Tips For Social Media Management

How do you choose which social networks and channels to focus on? By Jason Falls

After 5 years, Firefox faces new challenges

Five years ago, Mozilla made it clear that the browser wars weren't over after all. By Stephen Shankland

With AdMob, Google seeks mobile-ad advantage



When the long-expected development of smartphones and handheld devices into primary computers reaches maturity, Google wants to make sure it occupies just as strong a position on the small screen as it does on the big one. By Tom Krazit

Enabling the next level of innovation

Here’s a thought experiment: try to imagine what it would have been like to create Google before the era of the Internet and open standards. By Joi Ito

The 40th anniversary of the first internet connection

Forty years ago today, a team led by Leonard Kleinrock typed the “Lo” of “Login” into a Stanford computer, which promptly crashed before the command could be entered. But because Kleinrock’s team was sending this message from a UCLA machine, he had just taken part in one of the great milestones in communication history. By Michael Belfiore

Steve Jobs' Original Name for the iMac Was So Horrifying It Would Explode Your Ears




The iMac revived Apple after a decade of sickly malaise. The name is so obviously iconic. So it's shocking that Steve Jobs hated it and wanted to call it something so awful it would "curdle your blood." By Matt Buchanan

TED - Ian Goldin: Navigating our global future

Winking robot nav head knows where you're going




AIDA's expressive behaviors are designed to endear the device to you as it helps in your daily navigation. The robot learns your daily commute and which areas you frequent for which purposes.

Flickr betters its apps, developer showcase



It seems like everyone has an application directory these days, and now Flickr is no exception. By Josh Lowensohn

Twitter translates into Spanish



So how do you say "fail whale" en español? Twitter has launched a Spanish translation, according to a blog post Tuesday (in Spanish) by co-founder Biz Stone. By Caroline McCarthy