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The competition between popular children's apps got more intense over the past two months as PlayKids, the top grossing kids app in over 20 countries, was launched in China last December and achieved over 300,000 downloads in the first month.

Biometric security is poised to have a breakout year, driven largely by cheaper, more sophisticated sensors and a global user market that is experiencing massive password fatigue.

A personal visit to Silicon Valley by the U.S. Secretary of Transportation this week, followed by the release of a major annual report on the health of the region's economy provided hints of a future for the country's technology capital that will include huge transit challenges and optimism that the current tech boom is not another "bubble."

For as long as the Internet has existed, the most common model for generating revenue has been ads which, when clicked, pay out tiny amounts of money. Based on a major mobile media conference this week and recent news from Facebook, that model is about to change.

Movile, the largest mobile services and software developer in Latin America, has been quietly raising significant investment and acquiring new businesses over the past year. And as the Brazilian technology conglomerate extends their reach into new global markets such as China and the U.S., the activity of major industry players such as Apple, Facebook, and Google in Latin America is drawing a renewed focus on that region of the world.

An important debate opens this Wednesday as both the House and Senate will hold hearings on the issue of net neutrality. The outcome of proposed legislation that will come from Congressional committees combined with a decision expected next month by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) could have a major impact on both the price we pay for home Internet access and how we use it.

Amidst all the recent media coverage of wearable computing or connected devices for the smart home there is a larger, and perhaps more significant, development taking place that could dominate headlines in the hardware space for 2015. The coming year could show major advances in the world of 3D printing.

January usually marks the beginning of the big annual auto shows held in major U.S. cities across the country, where major automakers unveil their latest models and technologies. But the real kickoff has now clearly become the CES (Internal Consumer Electronics Show) held last week in Las Vegas, where a record 11 automakers made significant news involving alternative fuel vehicles and a host of technology enhancements that car consumers will begin seeing as early as this year.

With over 3,600 exhibitors at this year's CES (The International Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas, it's impossible to even categorize all of the various new innovations and technologies on display, much less see them all. But it is possible to discover a few products that offer new and different ways to use technology in today's wired and wireless world.

Whether it involves competitors or pushback from users over surge pricing, the ride-sharing service Uber has been aggressive in defending its position. At CES (The International Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas yesterday, Uber's top policy lobbyist took a similar stance when asked about his company's approach to regulatory compliance in local markets.

The early news out of CES (The International Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas this week is that the world's major smart television makers are convinced that 4K Ultra HDTV (UHDTV) is the future for their industry, that bigger (and curved) screens are better, and that they need to move quickly to make the user interface mesh with other connected devices, especially smartphones.

Starting with media-only events this coming Sunday, the annual major gathering of the technology world in Las Vegas known as CES (The International Consumer Electronics Show) will kick off six days of mass hype, hoopla, and hopefully real news. It will set the tone for what consumers can expect in the coming year and, as CES history has shown, there will be some interesting technology which could have a big impact and new products that won't go anywhere at all.

"Employees are ridiculously expensive right now." (Venture capitalist Bill Gurley at SV Innovation Summit in July)

In less than 72 hours, new laws passed primarily by state legislatures in 2014 will go into effect that will impact how we use technology in the coming year. These laws run the gamut, covering everything from nude pictures to self-driving cars.

As shoppers mob stores and online sites to finish their holiday shopping this month, they will find no shortage of books for sale by technology executives from companies big and small. Indeed, 2014 was a year when a number of tech company leaders, some well-known and a few who are not, felt compelled to share their philosophies of management, business savvy, and a lot more in hardbound, glossily packaged books.

It did not get a lot of media attention last month, but Napster co-founder and Facebook's first president Sean Parker took a major step towards building his new company - Brigade Media - that hopes to transform voter engagement at the state and federal level. Parker joins a growing list of technology leaders and billionaires who have formed for-profit and non-profit ventures over the past two years seeking to capitalize on the interest of political and advocacy campaigns in using new technologies to further their cause.

MongoDB held their fifth annual "DB Days" event in San Francisco earlier this month, featuring presentations from some of their bigger name partners and customers such as eBay, Teradata, and Rackspace, but they also provided further evidence that they are poised to take full advantage of the big data revolution.

An impressive lineup of technology executives took the stage on Tuesday in San Francisco at "Navigate," the Atlantic Tech Conference 2014, and several company leaders offered glimpses into future new technologies, the evolving "Internet of Things" industry, and their own personal passions.

The man who produced the first Palm Pilot and went on to found Numenta told a Silicon Valley gathering last week that he believes his company will successfully produce the first computers which can think and reason on their own. "We're going to finish this off in less than five years," declared Jeff Hawkins, co-founder of Numenta.

Lisa Ellman, a former White House senior advisor on technology and now counsel at the law firm of McKenna Long & Aldridge, told an audience of company executives at a meeting of the Bay Area Council in San Francisco on Monday that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has sent a draft of new rules governing the use of drones (unmanned aerial vehicles) to the White House for review. "The rules are literally being written as we speak," Ellman told the group.

The high profile cyberattack on Sony and discovery of the Regin malware infecting databases around the globe have generated a great deal of news coverage in recent days, as security experts reinforce the message that no systems are truly safe. But the real story behind the headlines is that these attacks carry all the hallmarks of well-financed and carefully developed intrusions that could only be accomplished by nations themselves, not organized crime or renegade groups of hackers.

PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel spoke to attendees at the first Post Seed 2014 Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday and told the gathering that he did not view the currently hot technology startup market as a tech bubble. "We are nowhere near the 1999/2000 insanity," said Thiel, referring to the infamous "dot com" collapse when many new technology firms failed to survive.

With all of the publicity surrounding Bitcoin these days, a great deal of attention is being paid to the digital currency's price (currently around $375 to the dollar). Yet the real story may not be in what a Bitcoin is actually worth, but how a surprising number of startup companies are designing their fledgling business models around the technology tools that make the cryptocurrency actually work.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case involving online threats made through Facebook. It is the first time that the nation's highest court will confront the question of whether social media users can be prosecuted for careless actions online and represents a continued willingness by the judicial branch to deal with technology issues in the absence of action by Congress or the White House.

The field of new devices and applications for the mobile space is getting more crowded these days, as technology breakthroughs and consumer demand are powering a wave of exciting products. Although there is increased speculation that Google's revolutionary computerized eyewear - Glass - may never become a widely accepted consumer product, demonstrations at a recent mobile conference show that technology researchers are still fully prepared to usher us boldly into a gesture based world.