I hope everyone is enjoying or enjoyed their Thanksgiving Holiday. Here in LA nothing marks the real start to the holiday season and hence the end of the year like Thanksgiving. So before we totally wind down 2009 and head into 2010, I thought it would be good to look at what is and is not worth attention in the coming year.

With more and more web and app enabled phones hitting the streets everyday location based applications and services seem to be gaining an edge. While ones first instinct is that people are not willing to share location information for privacy reasons, more and more the opportunities and incentives seem to be pushing that aside. Foursquare.com was recently featured by Om Malik on Business Week, this web start up makes an addictive game out of checking in at your favorite locations. Needless to say this opens the door for many different opportunities for the user, the location, the advertiser and Foursquares.com itself.

Starbucks instant coffee, while at first this seemed like a good way to leverage the Starbucks brand into an existing $21 billion global market for instant coffee and despite a massive multi-front marketing campaign, ultimately this product may be faltering. Baristas are finding the promotion to be stressful and customers feel the high pressure pitch for the product is a bit exasperating. Did Starbucks fail to realize that while the brand was good, their outlet (the stores) was a poor place to push the product. It is interesting how Starbucks which was said to have the best counter space for selling stuff seems to have missed fired on their own offering.

Video on the Web, Joost may soon be a passing would of, should of, could of story but I do not think anything is settled or fixed in the world of video on the web. With more eyes flocking to the second (computer) and third screens (phone) the battle here is just heating up. Clearly Apple and Hulu our players to content with but how the opportunities will unfold is anyone guess. Hulu is talking about subscription/premium platforms and Business Week has learned that Hulu is in early-stage talks with cable operators, including Comcast and Time Warner, to limit access to those viewers who can prove they already pay for a cable subscription.

Now while I think location based services are to be watched I am not so sure that Augmented Reality applications which allow you to use the camera on your cell phone to meshing digital information into your real-world images will be a hit. Despite all the talk Augmented Reality has sparked little interest within the tech communities. Recently this technology has made appearances in everything from Topps baseball cards and Honey Nut Cheerios cereal boxes to John Mayer's Heartbreak Warfare music video and Michael Bay's DVD release of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

Obviously there is a lot more hot or not technologies to consider like, VOIP, GoogleWave, Twitter, Micro-Lending, e-books, SAS, Cloud Services and much much more.

So join us as we get a jump start on next year and explore what will be hot and what will be not in 2010. After all one thing is for sure networking is always hot, this year or next year now is the time to get out and expand your network of contacts.

As always, there is no better way to meet and connect with other executives then over dinner and conversation. $21 in advance via PayPal or $25 at the event gets you a full dinner, drink and the best networking around.