Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina published her book, Tough Choices, this year, and watched as new CEO Mark Hurd turned the company around and got caught up in a spying scandal

HP CEO Mark Hurd continued to lead a stunning turnaround at the company, while the company's dysfunctional board spun out of control

Yahoo executive Brad Garlinghouse was the author of the now famous Peanut Butter Manifesto, that offered a scathing critique of his company

Now formerly of News Corp., Ross Levinsohn brought MySpace into the media giant

Digg's Kevin Rose continues to lead the wisdom of the masses (sort of) news site and now is adding video and podcasting as categories

2006 was another big year for salesforce.com, led by the software as a service pioneer Marc Benioff

Oracle CEO continued on the road to Fusion in 2006, and continued to roll up more companies in his net

Steve Jobs continues to outduel competitors with his iPod economy and his next conquest is to bring the Mac into the living room

In 2006 Hector Ruiz of AMD and Michael Dell decided to do business, much to Intel's chagrin

Shai Agassi, head of products and technology at SAP, continued his battle with Oracle in 2006, making progress toward the SOA promised land

Bill Gates was very visible and accessible in 2006, pitching Vista, Live and that Google is not invulnerable, as well as speaking on behalf of his philanthropic foundation

Al Gore was all over the map, including the D Conference, with a TV channel, book, movie and environmental and political opinions

Sun's James Gosling, Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green plotting to turn Sun back into the powerhouse it once was

Lilly at home posing for her annual picture

Blog father Dave Winer, who may stop blogging in 2007

TechCrunch's Mike Arrington continued to lead the charge in covering the Web 2.0 phenomenon

Microsoft (Word, etc) legend and future astronaut Charles Simonyi and Martha Stewart a the D Conference

Identity geeks and bloggers Doc Searls and Phil Windley

Tech events aren't as extravagant as in past decades, but at some events a bit of entertainment is allowed

Interesting people: Barak Berkowitz, Jean Louis Gassee, Joi Ito and Esther Dyson chatting at PC Forum

MySQL CEO Marten Mickos peering into the future, looking for the big database in the sky

2006 was the year of podcasting: Doc Searls with Podtech.net's John Furrier and Podshow's Steve Gillmor

David Berlind leads as session at Mashup Camp, where loosely coupled things come together

Nicholas Negroponte shows of a prototype of the $100 PC (not quite that cheap but getting there), which will be debut next year

Regarding fighting Internet crime, Craiglist's Craig Newmark said this year: "I don't think I'm Batman," he said. "I'm more like McGruff the crime dog."

A meetup of the Enterprise Irregulars and friends, a group of blogging and pontificating individuals interested in the future of enterprise computing

Gabe Rivera, creator of the popular TechMeme (and other meme trackers like Ballbug)

Intel CEO Paul Otellini had a tough year in 2006, but plans to big comeback in 2007

Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie has a big year ahead, with Vista and Office 2007 launched and major expectations around on demand Web applications and competing with Google

Life on the Pacific Ocean in southern California

Walt Mossberg challenges Terry Semel over Yahoo's policy on doing business in China. For Yahoo, 2007 shapes up to be a reorganizing and refocusing year

Google CEO Eric Schmidt saw the company's stock rocket past $500 and preached that you cannot fight the Internet...

Alibaba CEO Jack Ma plans to take on Google search in China in 2007

Food I would not eat at an technology conference

Super blogger Robert Scoble went from Microsoft to Podtech.net with his HD camera and sets of questions

Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom plans to launch a global broadband television service in 2007

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos turned his company's infrastructure services into a new business, the Elastic Compute Cloud, in 2006

IAC Chairman Barry Diller and NYT Publisher Arthur Sulzberger do what all busy executives do--talk and read email at the same time

People I often see at conferences: Mary Hodder (Dabble), Om Malik (Om) and Dave Sifry (Technorati)

My friend Steven Levy, author of the Perfect Thing, a meditation on the iPod, in a store that just happened to be a good background for the picture

A trio of SP execs: Leo Apotheker, Henning Kagermann and Shai Agassi

Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has added green tech to his portfolio, focusing on biofuels as a way to save the planet and make money

Colin Powell spoke at the salesforce.com Dreamforce conference. For half the speech he was a comedian and then turned more serious about how 2006 wasn't necessarily a good year militarily

Uber VC John Doerr and his friend Charlie Rose

Sunrise