The latest phase in the I.T. revolution is being driven by the convergence of social media — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Groupon, Zynga — with the proliferation of cheap wireless connectivity and Web-enabled smartphones and “the cloud” — those enormous server farms that hold and constantly update thousands of software applications, which are then downloaded (as if from a cloud) by users on their smartphones, making them into incredibly powerful devices that can perform myriad tasks.

The emergence of the cloud, explained Alan Cohen, a vice president of Nicira, a new networking company, “means than anyone can have the computing resources of Google and rent it by the hour.” This is speeding up everything — innovation, product cycles and competition.

The October issue of Fast Company has an article about the designer Scott Wilson, who thought of grafting the body of an iPod Nano onto colorful wristbands, turning them into watchlike devices that could wake you up and play your music. He had no money, though, to bring his concept to market, so he turned to Kickstarter, the Web-based funding platform for independent creative projects. He posted his idea on Nov. 16, 2010, reported Fast Company, and “within a month, 13,500 people from 50 countries had ponied up nearly $1 million.” Apple soon picked up the product for its stores. Said Alexis Ringwald, 28, who recently founded an education start-up, her second Silicon Valley venture: “I have many friends — they introduce themselves as ‘reformed’ Wall St. bankers and lawyers — who have abandoned conventional careers and are now launching start-ups.”

Some like Rich Kaarlgard have been describing this as the “cheap revolution” for years. Friedman is explaining the new developments in that area. We now have it all at our fingertips all the time. It’s a powerful and exciting development. Kickstarter is a great crowdsourcing example that thrives in this environment.

Friedman uses the column to contrast Wall Street and Silicon Valley. It’s a good read.

Cisco took the embarrassing step of killing the Flip camera last week. Jeff Morgan digs into the entire episode and he isn’t very impressed with how the tech behemoth handled the entire affair.

To say that Cisco misunderstands the consumer tech market would be like saying NBA players misunderstand what constitutes consent. The company decided just over a week ago to kill off the Flip video, a line of consumer camcorders that Cisco purchased for some $590 million. The key word there is kill, as in kaput – no more Flip. Cisco isn’t even going to try to sell the camcorder line to another company, and probably for good reason – there isn’t a company on the planet that would buy it. Instead, Cisco is simply throwing it away, along with 550 jobs as part of an attempt to refocus the company.

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Cisco should have known better, too. For a company that has dealt with some level of consumer tech for more than 15 years (Linksys was founded in 1995), the Flip move was remarkably dumb. I would have loved to sit in on the meeting in which Cisco offered nearly $600 million for a product that had a very obvious expiration date in the very near future. How do you look at a company that keeps buying up smaller and smaller sensors and not think, ‘Gee, do you think some one will put this in a phone one day, fellas?’ As a matter of fact, let me lay this out for the neanderthals Cisco has running its investments – if you want to buy a piece of tech today, ask yourself whether or not it’s feasible to put that feature into a phone in the near future.

I wonder how the regulators will justify letting this transaction go through. AT&T wants to buy T-Mobile for $39 billion, so we would be down to just three major carriers in the United States. AT&T will become the largest carrier in the US, surpassing Verizon, but now consumers will have far fewer choices.

At this time of year, students are buying textbooks and looking for ways to avoid reading them.

Nothing is new about that. CliffsNotes guides, with their familiar yellow and black covers, have been in book bags since 1958.

What has changed is how many study guides, or cheat sheets, are available online and on mobile phones. Whether you know them as CliffsNotes, SparkNotes or Shmoop, these seemingly ubiquitous guides are now, in many cases, free.

“Two to three years ago, the wisdom was that students do research online, but not study online,” said Emily Sawtell, a founder of McGraw-Hill’s online collaborative study site called GradeGuru. “That has changed in the last 12 months.” Ms. Sawtell said she had tracked a significant increase in the search term “study guide” on Google.

All in all, this is a net plus, as access to information is always a good thing, though it can obviously be abused. The real challenge is to train younger students how to focus on a subject without distractions so real learning takes place.

There’s no doubt about it, Facebook represents a radicalization of social communication. Its use has skyrocketed from its beginnings in 2005. In 2008 it overtook the once highly popular Myspace as the world’s most popular social networking site. By July 2010, Facebook boasted 500 million users.

Mark Zuckerberg, a student at Harvard University, started Facebook way back in 2004. Initially the site was limited to students at Harvard, and then expanded to other universities. By 2005 the site became available to general Internet users over the age of 13. Its use and revenue quickly grew, and then in 2009 it exploded.

What’s interesting about Facebook as a social networking tool is that it attracts multigenerational users, from teenagers to senior citizens. It allows users to get in touch with just about anyone, anywhere, without using up all their AT&T wireless coverage, as long as they have a free Facebook account.

As its use has increased, more and more people have utilized it to renew relationships from long ago. High school sweethearts long separated have found each other. Children given up for adoption decades ago have reunited with their birth parents. In this way Facebook is a kind of miracle. It’s enabled friends, lovers and families, to reconnect, something almost impossible to accomplish just a few years ago.

Where will Facebook and the social media revolution take us? Are we becoming too connected? Will we lose every vestige of our privacy? No one knows. For now, all we can do is hold on tight, surf the web and keep connecting. We’ll find out where we’ve gone to when we get there.

The Obama administration gave a major boost to the wireless industry Monday by announcing plans to make available for commercial use a huge swath of spectrum.

Obama signed a presidential memorandum directing the federal government and private companies to identify unused airwaves that could be auctioned off, or at least shared, to expand mobile broadband for consumers over the next decade. The goal is to free up some 500 megahertz — almost double the current amount of spectrum available for commercial use — by reallocating airwaves now operated by companies, broadcasters and government agencies.

This is welcome news to those of us who believe that the wireless industries provides one of the largest areas of potential economic growth over the next 10 years.

In-flight Wi-Fi is not yet a commodity, but it is no longer a rarity. Most domestic airlines have been upgrading their fleets to offer the service more widely, to the point where nearly one-third of the roughly 2,800 aircraft in the nation’s passenger fleet are equipped with Wi-Fi, according to Aircell, the company that equips most of the Wi-Fi-enabled planes in the United States.

If you travel on planes a lot and plan to use Wi-Fi frequently, you can shave some expense from the process if you have a Wi-Fi-enabled mobile device like an iPhone or Droid, which incur lower charges than the fees charged by airlines if you use a smartphone or laptop without Wi-Fi. If you don’t have your own device, airlines are not yet providing one.

But no matter what device you use, the connection process is fast and usually pain free.

On the other hand, an airplane has been one of the few areas where you were forced to go without a connection for a period of time. Wi-Fi can certainly come in handy to kill time or deal with issues that can’t wait, but we’re learning that putting away your phone and laptop can be important for your long-term sanity. I guess we now at least have a choice.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs poses with the new iPhone 4 during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. The new features are quite impressive as Apple builds upon the momentum from the iPad.

Meanwhile, many app developers are worried as AT&T will no longer be offering unlimited data plans. I can see the concern, as users don’t want to worry about what they are consuming. The beauty of many apps is that they are free, or they are so cheap that the decision to purchase is insignificant. This may upset the balance, no matter how good the iPhone gets.

An app store lets companies tap into ideas from third-party innovators while retaining firm control over their brands. And that’s both its charm and its flaw. “The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed its reputation with programmers more than anything else they’ve ever done,” wrote Paul Graham, cofounder of the venture firm Y Combinator, on his blog.

The central problem is Apple’s heavy-handed management: Nothing gets into Apple’s store without the company’s express approval. Its restrictions have pushed several high-profile developers to quit the iPhone, and have bred ill will with the programmers who’ve remained. Apple may feel it has room to misbehave. No other phone can offer developers anywhere near the number of customers to be found in the App Store, so what choice do they have?

That’s a miscalculation, because the App Store’s true rival isn’t a competing app marketplace. Rather, it’s the open, developer-friendly Web. When Apple rejected Google Latitude, the search company’s nearby-friend-mapping program, developers created a nearly identical version that works perfectly on the iPhone’s Web browser. Google looks to be doing something similar with Voice, another app that Apple barred from its store. Last fall, Joe Hewitt, the Facebook developer who created the social network’s iPhone app, quit developing for Apple in protest of the company’s policies. Where did he go? Back to writing mobile apps for Web browsers.

Apple’s app bonanza won’t end anytime soon, but you’d be a fool to ignore the long-term trend in software — away from incompatible platforms and restrictive programming regimes, and toward write-once, run-anywhere code that works on a variety of devices, without interference from middlemen. As different kinds of mobile devices hit the market, from phones to tablet PCs to smartpens to e-book readers and beyond, developers will find that trend harder to ignore. They’ll need to create programs that can work not just on iPhones but on everything. Fortunately, there’s an app for that: It’s called the Web.

Apple is riding an incredible wave of success with iPhone apps, and things will only get more hectic with the introduction of the iPad that goes on sale tomorrow. Apple needs to redouble its efforts to control this situation in a manner that is fair to all participants.