Top tech industry news stories of 2011 — so far

World IPv6 Day. The one-day, worldwide event designed to show off the capabilities and readiness of the Internet Protocol update went off with nary a hitch. World IPv6 Day, which involved 400 organizations including big name content suppliers, carriers, hardware vendors and software makers, was said to be the most watched tech-related event since New Year’s Eve 1999, when all eyes were on the Y2K bug. 

LulzSec wreaks havoc. The short-lived hacking group garnered international attention by attacking websites belonging to governments and companies, including the CIA and Sony. Itended its reign of cyberterror in late June: “Our planned 50 day cruise has expired, and we must now sail into the distance, leaving behind – we hope – inspiration, fear, denial, happiness, approval, disapproval, mockery, embarrassment, thoughtfulness, jealousy, hate, even love,” the group said in a post on the Pastebin website. Though LulzSec might not completely have faded away, with some members reportedly joining the Anonymous hacking group.

Microsoft heads into the clouds. Microsoft debuted its Office 365 cloud service — the company’s answer to Google Apps — and the latest Microsoft offering designed to expand the company’s reach beyond packaged software. Microsoft is giving some organizations big incentives to use the new offering. Office 365 complements earlier Microsoft cloud offerings, including its Azure platform-as-a-service, which hasn’t caught on in a big way yet.

MAY

Microsoft-Skype $8.5B blockbuster. Microsoft’s bold buyout of the voice and video IP company is seen by analysts as an aggressive move to challenge Google, Facebook and others for the hearts, minds and wallets of online users. Some industry watchers say Microsoft actually had technology in its portfolio to compete with Skype on many fronts, but that buying the company gives Microsoft lots of customers fast. The combination of the Skype buyout and advances on the Windows Phone 7 front also gives Microsoft its strongest mobile offerings to date.

OpenFlow grabs Interop spotlight. The big Interop 2011 show could almost have been called the OpenFlow show given that it served as one of the first significant exhibitions of OpenFlow switches and controllers, including those shown off in a lab at the event. The software-defined networking technology is designed to enable users to define flows and determine what paths those flows take through a network, regardless of the underlying hardware. OpenFlow stems from an open source project borne of a six-year research collaboration between Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. 

Sony PlayStation Network: game off. A major hack of Sony’s PlayStation Network knocked the PS3 gaming community offline for days and Sony revealed players’ personal information, including credit card numbers, may have been swiped. With more than 70 million people using the network, some are calling this breach one of the worst ever and a possible ID theft bonanza. 

More telecom consolidation. Seems the only way to get more powerful — or less weak — in telecom these days is to join forces. A couple of huge deals went down in April, withCenturyLink buying hosting provider Savvis for $2.5 billion shortly after finalizing its Qwest buyout, and Level 3 airing plans to buy out Global Crossing for about $1.9 billion.

Smartphones are watching you. Apple, Google and Microsoft were all answering questions after it was made widely public that some smartphones have software that enables vendors to track users’ locations. This media storm started with revelations about iPhones and iPads store data about users’ whereabouts, prompting Apple CEO Steve Jobs to assure at least one customer the issue was being misunderstood and blown out of proportion and prompting Apple to explain that it merely tracks WiFi hotspot and cell tower locations so that it can access that information when it’s requested. Meanwhile, two users filed a lawsuit claiming Apple’s actions violated federal privacy law, and naturally lawmakers got into the act as well. Google and Microsoft didn’t escape scrutiny either. 

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud’s bad stretch. A major outage for Amazon’s EC2 service due to undisclosed server problems resulted in customers’ websites being down and/or flakey for days (even for those who took the precaution of signing on for multiple availability zones, and raised all the usual concerns about whether it’s still too early to trust your business to the cloud due to shortcomings in failing over such systems. Amazon, despite being plugged into social network systems such as blogs and Twitter, was conspicuously quiet about what went wrong, perhaps due to legal concerns.

Epsilon breached. A security breach at email marketing company Epsilon Interactive resulted in dozens of its customers — including big names like Best Buy, Capital One and Eddie Bauer — issuing warnings to their customers about theft of names and email addresses. Epsilon has sworn it will build a “Fort Knox” around its breached system, though kept details of the breach close it vest. The fear remains that customers whose names and email addresses were swiped could become phishing targets. 

MARCH

AT&T bids for T-Mobile USA. AT&T’s proposed takeover of T-Mobile USA would create the biggest carrier in the United States, with some 129 million subscribers. The union also raises lots of big regulatory, competitive and customer service questions, with plenty of people unhappy about the prospects of this deal going down. 

Japanese earthquake/tsunami. Beyond the devastating human tragedy that has been the world’s main concern in the wake of Japan’s earthquakes and tsunami disaster, the high tech industry has been impacted greatly as well. Taiwanese semiconductor suppliers face serious raw materials shortages from Japan and concerns have been raised about Japanese suppliers to Apple for the iPad 2 as well. Chip plants for Texas Instruments and others in Japan expect months of disruption and undersea telecom cables in the Pacific Ocean were damaged. 

Browser makeover. Google, Microsoft and Mozilla all released significant new versions of their browsers. Google’s Chrome 10 focuses on security, speed and simplicity, with greater JavaScript performance, sandboxing technology for Adobe Flash, password encryption and an easier-to-use settings interface. Microsoft IE9 also boasts speed, privacy and simplicity improvements, but with a stripped-down interface, tracking protection, pinned sites, jump lists and enhanced support for HTML5. Mozilla Firefox 4 got a speed boost and several feature enhancements that are so significant that they all have their own proper names, like Panorama, JaegerMonkey and Firefox Sync.

RSA at risk. EMC’s RSA Security division shook the industry in March when its executive chairman announced that a sophisticated cyber-attack on the company might havecompromised its two-factor SecurID tokens. The advanced persistent threat attack led some observers to call on those using the tokens for remote access to sensitive information to stop doing so until RSA clarified the extent of possible compromise. 

Android Market feels malware pain. More than 50 applications containing malware were discovered in Google’s application market, a sign that hackers were hard at work trying to compromise mobile devices running the Android OS. In fact, it got so bad that Google threw a “kill switch” to remotely delete infected Android apps.

Apple — and Steve Jobs — intro iPad 2. The next generation of Apple’s iPad tablet computer is sleeker and more powerful than the original, and boasts two cameras so that users can use Apple’s FaceTime video chat. CEO Steve Jobs surprised the faithful by making the iPad 2 product introduction himself. Here’s a First Look at the tablet. The iPad 2 unveiling both excited and frustrated enterprise IT pros. 

FEBRUARY

Nokia embraces WP7. Microsoft and Nokia both have a lot to lose — and gain — by their mobile alliance, with the Finnish handset maker deciding to adopt Windows Phone 7 as its smartphone operating system. Nokia won’t abandon its own platforms, Symbian and MeeGo, yet. The company still plans to put out a “MeeGo-related” product later this year and “expects to sell 150 million more Symbian devices in the years to come,” it said.

Obama 4G. President Obama aired a proposal for bringing 4G wireless broadband service to 98% of the United States within 5 years. The plan, which would involve freeing up 500MHz of wireless spectrum over a decade, is expected to meet with plenty of questions from lawmakers and industry reps.

Mourning Olsen. Kenneth Olsen, the co-founder and longtime CEO of Digital Equipment Corp., passed away at the age of 84 on Feb. 6. He was remembered for his scientific focus and his epic battles vs. IBM and others as DEC rose to become the No.2 computer maker in the world before eventually succumbing to competition and being acquired by Compaq.

Bring on IPv6. The Internet ran out of IPv4 address space in early February when the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority assigned two of the remaining blocks of IPv4 addresses – each containing 16.7 million addresses – to the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre. This action sparked an immediate distribution of the remaining five blocks of IPv4 address space, with one block going to each of the five Regional Internet Registries. Now that IPv4 addresses are gone, Internet policy makers will be ratcheting up the pressure on network operators to migrate quickly to IPv6.

JANUARY

Egypt shuts down. Egypt’s shutdown of the Internet and cell phone networks in an effort to diffuse protests against the government not only burned free speech advocates around the world, but it cost the country’s economy at least $90 million, according to one report. It also raised the specter of an Internet “kill switch” being put into the U.S. President’s hands. 

Google go-round. Google announced in January that it was shaking up top management, with longtime CEO Eric Schmidt becoming executive chairman and co-founder Larry Page taking hold of the CEO reins all in the name of streamlining the company’s top-level decision making. It’s hard to argue that Schmidt, in coming to Google from Novell in 2001, didn’t make one of the greatest career moves in the history of history. 

Verizon+Apple, at last. Following month after excruciating month of rumors, Verizon and Apple finally got together in January and announced that the iPhone would be coming to Verizon’s network in February. Surveys backed up the notion that there was much pent up demand for the iPhone on an network other than AT&T’s, which has been criticized by many for dropping too many iPhone calls. The Daily Show host Jon Stewart said the news put an end out our long national iPhone nightmare. 

Steve Jobs takes leave. While almost everything seems to be going right for Apple, the health of its CEO Steve Jobs has been a constant concern. Jobs announced in January that he would be taking a leave of absence for medical reasons and that COO Tim Cook would be handling day-to-day operations in his stead. 

Microsoft, Muglia part ways. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer ousted Bob Muglia as head of the company’s Server and Tools Business, Windows Server 2008 generally gets high marks from customers, but Microsoft is still trying to prove itself in the virtualization and cloud markets, and it was the cloud computing area in particular where Ballmer focused in explaining the move. In February, Microsoft named Muglia’s replacement: Satya Nadella, who led the company’s technical efforts to launch its Bing search engine.

Apple’s latest app store. It turns out that the appeal of app stores isn’t just for smartphone and tablet computer users. Apple’s Mac App Store hit the 1 million download mark on its first day upon opening in January. The opening wasn’t without hitches, as a piracy vulnerability was spotted early on. Meanwhile, Apple hit the 10 billion app download mark on its earlier App Store about a week after the Mac App Store opened. 

LTE everywhere. AT&T at CES formally announced its plans to launch LTE services during the summer of 2011. AT&T also announced that it would be launching around 20 different “4G devices” this year, although many of those devices will actually run on its 3G HSPA+ wireless network. Much like rival carrier T-Mobile, AT&T refers to both the LTE and HSPA+ wireless standards as “4G” technologies even though HSPA+ is most widely considered a faster and more reliable version of the 3G GSM-based HSPA standard. Separately, Verizon at CES showed off 10 LTE devices it would be selling in the first half of 2011. This followed Verizon’s launch of LTE networks in December, 2010. 

CES tablet-mania: The Apple iPad assault ramped up at the annual CES gadgetfest in Las Vegas in January as Acer, Dell, Lenovo, LG, Motorola, NEC and others introduced Windows or Android tablet computers. RIM showed off its PlayBook tablet, Google previewed its tablet-optimized Android 3.0 software and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer talked up his company’s mobile plans, including ARM support for Windows.