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In Part 1, we looked at last years predictions. The numbers weren’t too shabby. This year, we’ve expanded the list to anyone that wanted to contribute. And Contributions I did get. 250 of them.

I spent most of Friday night and subsequent morning filtering the list to a couple pages worth of information. We have CEO’s, CTO’s, Marketers, Podcasters and even a Psychic helping us with this years list.

Of course at the end of the list I will be adding my 2 cents worth for 2009 on Page 2.  So without any further ado, let’s get started.

On the next page, I will be giving my predictions for 2009.

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The Economy is in Danger. Banks and Institutions are in a financial pickle. With the fall of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac because of bad business decisions and a Blind eye to investors building more homes than Americans need, financial institutions could collapse upon themselves. To protect their money, they could make it harder for Businesses to get loans.

I am building a business in Geekazine. I have been working hard in putting together a Business Plan for investors. Now I might find myself in a position where I possibly cannot find the investors and loans simply because any proposition can become a risky one. The 700 billion of taxpayers’ money to bail out these companies that the Government is proposing is set to keep things going for a while, but we are far from an answer. So what could be that answer – Maybe Technology?

Ten Years ago yesterday, Ebay put their company up for Public offering. They started at $18 a share. Currently they are at $22 a share and they employ thousands. Google employs over 10 thousand. These are companies that show us you can take nothing and turn it into something.

Could you imagine what could have happened if these companies didn’t get their financial backing? What would have happened if Microsoft or IBM didn’t get the funding to build their facilities? We wouldn’t be seeing 22 nm chips and 64 bit Operating Systems.

Businesszone.co.uk held a conference in May and within, the National Federation of Enterprise Agencies stated the number of startups in 2008 is 50 thousand less than in 2007. They believe it will pick up toward the end, however with the threat of financial companies possibly making it harder to lend money, we may just see startups plateau for now.

CIO.com asked back in January if Technology can bring us out of a recession. They talked about Green Technology and upgrading Infrastructure. MIT researchers posted ideas from their faculty to help. They believe that Bioengineering, Fusion, Robots and Sustainable Cities might help with the answer. This is all well and good, but are these items that can turn our current economy around?

Of course those articles came out a couple months before the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Wall Street was still in a stable position. So Now, we need to find ways to get Wall Street and Financial Institutions back on their feet. That is where technology comes in. What can technology do to contribute to bringing Wall Street back to stability?

In turning things around, though, we will have to keep an eagle eye on  those who will try to capitalize and throw us off track. Wrong thinkers and people willing to deceive the average American to make their own dollar. Crime does go up in times like these.

Wall Street & Technology has the best Headline though: Transform Intelligence into Action. Data is what drives us and Data is what can take us out of this. Trends in the Market, educated patterns and preemptive solutions will turn things around. Programs that can better project and warn us if something like a Government funded housing project is going to turn on us.

I wish I could tell you what technology could turn the market around. I bet if the programming minds out on Wall Street got together, someone can come up with a usable device or software. But if we can’t, you might want to stock up on rations.

Funny. We just shut down the Large Hadron Collider for a malfunction and reality is, we already have a big black hole sucking us in.

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The call is made. For years now we knew we couldn’t keep living like this, yet, we still did. Now (for America), the reality is coming light a freight train toward a brick wall. We keep pulling those brakes, yet we’re not stopping.

Ever since the first windmill, we have been trying to pull energy from resources to make our jobs easier. Powering a light, running a car or using a laptop. Energy is a way of life, and we take it for granted way too often.

Recently, there have been some who have jumped out of the gate to say they have an energy source that would help. There’s even an inventor that says he has created a device that will give free energy which he plans to unveil it on June 20^th. With all those claims, we still seem to be stuck in the same conundrum we have been for the last 20 years. Will we ever break free and have a clean, reusable energy for our daily routines?

Let’s take a look at probably one of the biggest energy resources – oil. We use it from powering our devices to making simple compounds. Ever since the cultivation of Oil we have been using it to work and play. According to the Department of Energy, the US uses 20 million Barrels of oil a day. That is 7 Billion barrels in a Year, for the US alone.

Let’s break down the Barrel to understand it all. A barrel of Oil is 42 Gallons – but when refined, the amount of oil is 44.77 Gallons. From each barrel, 43.9% is turned into Gasoline (19.65 Gallons). 22.4% goes to Diesel (10.03 Gallons), 9% goes to Jet Fuel (4.07 Gallons), 1% is lubricants (.46 Gallons) and the rest is other items. Therefore, if oil goes up, then the cost of everything also goes up.

So if we rely on it so much to create items and make them run, how can we ever get off this resource? Maybe the answer is to not totally get off of it, but make it less of a necessity. For example – if we had a mixed resource, a barrel of oil might still cost the same, however you would need less oil to do things like make gasoline.

This is where the race is on. Alternate fuel could mean lower cost and better environment. Ethanol has been thought to be the alternative resource, however, although e85 runs cleaner, it contains less energy than gas. Therefore, you might spend less filling up, but overall you would spend more because gas millage would go down with E85.

Enter in Coskata – a biofuel startup in Illinois who claims they can make ethanol for less than a dollar a gallon, using a bacteria applied to organic material to turn into ethanol. This would mean that everyday trash could get converted easily. So Doc Browns “Mr. Fusion” might just be a reality after all.

Another set of researchers – one at UMass, and the other at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been working on “Green Fuel”, a way to pull gas from biomass sources, like poplar trees and switchgrass. The UW-M’s idea is to also fuse the green fuel with Jet fuel – which would make a gasoline that you could put into the current car you drive.

Oil and Gasoline is not the only advance in the last year. SUNGRI, a solar energy design and developer, has put together a system that takes sunlight and amplifies it over 1600 times to extract and charge power cells. This form of Solar Power could drop the cost from 20 cents per kWh to 5 cents per kWh, therefore making solar power a reality cost-wise.

Wind Power hasn’t advanced too much, however it still can do it’s part in reducing the use of Fossil Fuels. Alone, wind power might not power our needs, but added in with solar and other alternate energies, wind power could easily enhance our need.

All of these answers won’t solve our problems right this moment. If you look at current production, some analysts say if more refineries were built, we could focus on Heavy crude oil, which costs less than light crude. It would also reduce the strain on the 149 refineries in the US and result in less problems that could shut the plant down.

The best solution would be to use less energy. Unfortuneately, we may never see that option, so the better solution would be to become resourceful. All these plans will at least take one to two years to push off the ground. That’s considering if they work night and day to get processes perfected and refineries built. Add another year to put together stock to actually push out. It’s a great start to solve the issues and they can be great advancements to multiple years of research. If green is a viable option at a great price, then we might get back on track to power the world in a safe way.

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Penryn Mac – Gizmodo
Apple Products coming – MacRumors
Microsoft Reporting Standard – Microsoft
iTunes is #2 – Ars technica
Hacking Contest – eWeek
TI Chips beyond Phones – Reuters

Stage6 Shutdown – Register
Bloglines Shutdown? – TechCrunch
Ad Revenue 21 Billion – AP
ICANN, Network Solutions Sued – Ars technica
High Speed Satellite – Computerworld

30 Second Promo -Caffination Podcast

Ubuntu Mobile – Ubuntu
Adobe Air – Adobe
TimesMachine – BoingBoing
Dunnington Processor – Ars technica
5 year Security Review – eWeek

Radar Invented – Wired
Vista Capable Lawsuit – PCWorld
Wii Updates – Wiifanboy
Homebrew Wii – Engadget
Chumby Launched – Geek

Of Note:
Last Days of CompUSA
Convertable Glasses
Box Office Reciepts 1986-2007
Lego Flash Drive