My top 3 innovations of advertising and media technology in 2010:

—Tablet devices. I’m not singling out just the Apple iPad, but also the Samsung Galaxy and Blackberry Playbook.

—Facebook targeting tools. The “business side” of Facebook became much more robust this year for advertisers.

—Social buying and dealmaking: Groupon, LocalTwist, Swoop, etc.

My Top 3 innovations for 2011 in advertising and media technologies:

—Addressable TV. Google announced recently that Google TV will not be going into production, but I still think we will see a much more robust market for searchable, addressable, Internet-enabled TV. It could come from Apple, Comcast, or some new player.

—Smart human interface devices. The new Microsoft Kinect and the recently unveiled Plantronics Voyager earpiece show how physical devices will become even smarter when it comes to interacting with natural human motion.

—Augmented reality. QR codes, augmented reality apps, and devices represent a variety of methods that are making it easier to combine the digital world and real world. My bold prediction is that augmented reality will go mainstream next year.

[Editor's note: This is part of a series of posts from Xconomists and other technology leaders from around the country who are weighing in with their thoughts on the leading developments or surprises in the past year or things to watch in the coming year.]

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—Personalization based on predicted intent instead of past behavior (based on cookie).

—More robust “universal search:” Better results for text and descriptive searches on videos, pictures, inside games, and applications.

—GPS-based hyper-targeting of search results and advertising on smartphones.

—Ubiquitous and non-text search: Search as an integrated activity rather than a separate activity into videos, music, etc. Search on images, tones, smells, and not just text-based phrases and descriptions.

—3-D search: Search will have new display and navigation metaphors beyond text and html links on a flat white background.

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I’ve been predicting for a while that the marketing agencies and website developers that don’t have deep technical capabilities in search engine optimization will be left by the side of the road. Now we’re seeing it come to pass with Adobe’s $1.8 billion buyout of Omniture. [Adobe Systems announced the acquisition on Sept. 15, and U.S. antitrust regulators recently granted an early termination of their review.]

When Adobe’s chief marketing officer, Ann Lewnes, says marketing is the new finance, she’s not talking Orwellian double-speak. She means the digital age is driving the corporate marketing function to become accountable for spending in a far more rigorous and precise way than the “Mad Men” days of estimating “reach and frequency.” And that’s what Adobe’s Omniture acquisition is really all about.

This merger is intended to develop creative content in a holistic way and to measure the value of that content—whether it is video, web pages, mobile content, or social media content. This deal represents a way to “close the loop” in terms of creating digital content and measuring its impact.

Precisely measuring how people use a website is what we do at San Diego-based Covario. We view this deal as a brilliant strategic move for Adobe—one that could change the rules of the game for digital media, from creation to measurement to monetization. It represents changes in technology that will finally and irreversibly mark the end of an era.

This is what we see coming in the new Adobe media world:

—Video developers and agencies will build Adobe Flash creative content with Omniture tracking codes implanted from the beginning. This will enable them to track online views of that content across the web, and perhaps even begin to … Next Page »

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