8. The Wonder of Wii

Yes, it is just a game console, but it definitely has its special place in the “top tech events of the decade" list. Nintendo Wii was launched in 2006 and it introduced a new and entirely intuitive way of interacting with technology. Want to play Wii golf? Just grab your Wii controller, take a swing, and watch the virtual ball soar toward the green. The family-friendly Wii represents the greatest advance in input devices since the mouse.

9. Mobile phones and their improvement

It may seem hard to believe, but back in 2000, not everyone had a mobile phone. And people who did have them used them only to make phone calls! Quite old-fashioned, you may say, knowing the abilities of nowadays mobile phones. The BlackBerry – a terrible phone but an useful e-mail device – was a business breakthrough in the first years of the century. The category expanded with other consumer devices like the Sidekick and smartphones such as the Palm Treo. And now, with the iPhone 3GS and the Droid, we can brag having a full-scale computers in our pockets.

10. Entertainment Everywhere

Television, movie theaters, CDs, DVDs, and books are so 20th century. Today users want to have fun and they want their fun any place they are. Think Hulu, iTunes, streaming video, Tivo, and YouTube on iPods, Kindles, Slingboxes, smartphones, and more. Even the ambitious project Netflix – which beated its competition by offering unlimited DVD rentals by mail – ad to reconsider its business model and add a streaming option. The music industry may have managed to shut down peer-to-peer file-swapping site Napster on and sue a bunch of college students over illegal music downloads but ultimately it failed to stop the pirate music downloads. Instant gratification isn't just a personal wish anymore – it's a consumer way of thinking.

11. Skype

Before the launch of Skype, telecommunications were an expensive proposition, a serious line item in any home’s and company's budget. Now, the cost of fast and reliable communication even at long-distance is fast approaching zero, thanks to VoIP, which routes calls over IP networks. On the business side, VoIP has been around for some time, ultimately leading to game changers like call-center outsourcing. Consumers, though, had to wait until 2003, when the beta of Skype was released, allowing folks to make free phone calls, via Internet, to anywhere on the planet.

12. Cybercrime Meets Organized Crime

It's inevitable – once there's real money for stealing, the amateurs get pushed out and the professionals take their places. During the last decade, organized criminals managed to get easy money and to invent impressive brilliant online schemes to steal cash. According to several sources, by the end of the decade, most of the major corporate data breaches were directly attributable to organized crime.

13. Into the Cloud

As Web-based applications began to be used by more and more like desktop programs (thanks to clever software development technologies like Ajax), classic boxed software began to feel old hat. In the middle of the decade, all the talk was about "software as a service" (SaaS), in which a third party would host a business application on a server that subscribers could access, over the Internet. In 2008 or so, the term "cloud computing" appeared –it describes the infrastructure that allows software to be delivered to businesses and consumers from servers residing on the Internet. For consumers, Google Apps are probably the best known cloud-based offerings. But Amazon is also a big player in cloud services, and Microsoft has a cloud-based version of Office on tap for 2010. So if we aks what's the future of software, we can answer playfully in a word: Cloudy.

14. Megamerger Mania

It's a natural law – big fish eat small fish. The trend started in mid-decade, when HP, Oracle, and other large tech companies began to grab everything in sight. Notable items of that mania are the following: Compaq (by HP, 2001), JD Edwards (PeopleSoft, 2003), VMWare (EMC, 2003), Peoplesoft (Oracle, 2004), Siebel (Oracle, 2005), RSA (EMC, 2006), YouTube (Google, 2006), DoubleClick (Google, 2007), Hyperion (Oracle, 2007), WebEx (Cisco, 2007), BEA (Oracle, 2008), Cognos (IBM, 2008), EDS (HP, 2008), MySQL (Sun, 2008), and 3Com (HP, 2009).