This is the last day of the All Things Digital site, which began life in April of 2007 as a year-round extension of the D conference we launched in 2003. Since then, we have published nearly 40,000 posts and attracted millions of loyal readers.

Starting January 2, we’ll have an all-new site and suite of conferences, with a different name and Web address, run as an independent company with great investors and partners. It’s likely that you’ll hear a lot about it.

But before we go — this will be our last post here, by the way — we want to say we are intensely proud of what we did on this tech and media news and analysis site. And as we reach the end, we’d ask you to indulge us in a moment of sentimental reflection.

When AllThingsD began, we told readers we were aiming to present a fusion of new-media timeliness and energy with old-media standards for quality and ethics. And we hope you agree that we’ve done that.

Over the years, we’ve had numerous scoops, influential reviews and thoughtful analysis pieces. We have been the first to tell you what was going on inside the big tech companies, from Google to Microsoft to Amazon; what stealthy startups were doing and who was giving them money; and even exactly when Apple was introducing its next iDevice.

We have also explained in plain English what the mobile carriers and the e-retailers, the TV networks and cable companies were really doing — even if they said otherwise.

And we’ve tested hundreds of new products and services to tell you whether they were any good, from game-changers like the iPhone a couple of months after our site began, to a Bluetooth basketball last month.

We’ve also done what we humbly regard as some of the funniest liveblogs in the industry, and have brought you all the video and commentary for our own D conferences, all 11 of them. From the historic joint interview of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates a month after our site’s launch, through the carousel of CEOs at Yahoo, and many other memorable interviews, we think we have helped deliver some great moments in tech over the last decade.

As for that ethics thing, we’ve innovated there, as well. We introduced a transparent drop-down warning to all new users, cautioning them about tracking cookies. We placed a link to an individual ethics statement next to every writer’s byline. And we banned personal attacks and self-promotion from our comments. We also held stories until we were sure they had multiple solid sources, and killed them when they didn’t.

But what has always made us most proud over the years has been our stellar staff, which — although one of the smallest among tech sites — has worked brilliantly together, and punched far above its weight.

But now it is time to bid farewell to All Things Digital in all its incarnations. We hope you’ve enjoyed reading this site as much as we’ve enjoyed producing it.

As we noted, we are deeply grateful to our small but mighty team of writers, editors, developers, conference producers and business folks. And we thank Dow Jones for giving us the chance to run a small, entrepreneurial business inside a very big media company.

Most of all, we are in your debt for being our readers, and we hope you will follow us to the new site and conferences.

Because — in taking a page from the tech industry we cover — it’s once again time to refresh, reimagine, remake and reinvent. (You’ll see what that means soon enough.)

Or, as Kara wrote in her very first post for the website on April 18, 2007: “But enough looking back: On to the next thing.”

– Walt & Kara

Like Jon DeVaan, who announced Monday he was retiring from Microsoft, George was left without a clear role following a September reorganization of the Windows unit. That reorg followed the departure of Windows head Steven Sinofsky.

George joined Microsoft in 1994 as a tester in the then-newly formed Office unit following 14 years in testing at Tandem Computer.

Sinofsky, who worked with George on both Office and Windows, praised the contributions George made at Microsoft.

“Grant always represented the pinnacle of customer focus,” Sinofsky said. “His contributions to both Windows and Office were without parallel in the engineering discipline of testing, automation and quality.”

A Microsoft representative confirmed George’s departure, which he announced earlier Tuesday in a memo to colleagues, saying, “We thank him for his contributions to the company and wish him all the best.”

Before we end our reign of terror, oops, tech at AllThingsD, I wanted to post a few of my favorite videos from D: All Things Digital conferences that we have done since 2003.

While we are proud of all we have created on the news site, I think it is fair to say that the conferences have also been pretty dang fine and moreso taken as a whole. While others may try to trot out the phrase going forward, I think it’s fair to say we have owned “all things digital” for the last 11 years.

We’ve had a panoply of bigs in tech and media up there over those many conferences, all sitting in our signature red Steelcase chairs, with some memorable moments, including:

More than a half-dozen appearances by the late, great Steve Jobs of Apple, including an joint interview with Microsoft’s Bill Gates; the famous hoodie incident with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who managed to ably recover from the very sticky situation; the testy interview with former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina; the hysterical one with former Sony head Howard Stringer; the sassy one from former Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz; the future-is-here one with former DARPA head Regina Dugan; the silent-off with former Groupon CEO Andrew Mason; the geek-out with Hollywood director James Cameron; the epic Elon Musk chat from last year, he of SpaceX and Tesla.

And many, many more, now numbering in the hundreds, most of which you can find here.

We did not publish the videos for the first five conferences, as we did not have a site to post them too, but here are my top seven from each year we did, all joint appearances with Walt Mossberg, as well as one each from the smaller Dive and other conferences, featuring Peter Kafka, Liz Gannes and Ina Fried.

D5 (2007)

Hands down, the historic — and decidedly poignant — joint interview of Gates and Jobs:

D6 (2008)

New Corp’s Rupert Murdoch in a surprisingly — to the crowd, at least — avuncular mode (this is part one of six — here are the rest):

D7 (2009)

Twitter’s Biz Stone and Evan Williams in simpler days:

D8 (2010)

Zuckerberg and the hoodie that saved the day:

D9 (2011)

Browser man and VC Marc Andreessen on software eating the world:

D10 (2012)

Hollywood superagent Ari Emanuel is not shy:

D11 (2013)

Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk is Tony Stark:

Dive Into Media (2012)

Rust never sleeps for Neil Young:

Dive Into Media (2013)

Vice’s Shane Smith and CollegeHumor’s Ricky Van Veen are also not shy:

Dive Into Mobile (2010)

Google’s Susan Wojcicki is the most powerful Internet exec you don’t know as well as you should:

Dive Into Mobile (2013)

Google’s Eric Schmidt will take your questions now:

AsiaD (2011)

Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square is very inventive:

D@CES (2010)

Netflix’s Reed Hastings knows video:

D@CES (2011)

Twitter’s Dick Costolo is the fashion police of Las Vegas:

SaveUp and Mogl are two companies that have figured out formulas for rewards that are byproducts of normal activity. SaveUp users who save money and pay off debts can enter into sweepstakes for TVs, cars, trips and cash. Mogl users who pay at participating restaurants get 10 percent cash back that they can keep or donate to a local food bank.

Over the past couple years, I’ve attended startup showcases put on by financial platforms like Yodlee and Intuit, and have been surprised to find that consumer financial applications are few and far between. You see a lot of small-business tools and accounting software, but not as much innovation around helping people with their own money.

Though early and relatively small, SaveUp and Mogl are both personal financial tools with interesting twists. What they also have in common is this idea that once you’ve set up a connection with a bank account or credit card, good stuff follows mostly automatically. This isn’t a brand-new idea, but it’s especially relevant in the smartphone era, where people can get instant gratification. Another app that offers rewards as a byproduct of activity is Shopkick in retail stores.

For some people, these concepts might have more appeal than personal financial management in the mold of Mint, and the more modern Level, which is sort of a mobile, at-a-glance Mint.

“That’s good for wonky people,” said SaveUp CEO Priya Haji. “But for younger people and Midwestern moms, organizing finances is stressful, and tools are overwhelming. Money doesn’t have to look serious; it can be fun. That’s what money already is for rich people. They love checking their stock accounts.”

“What we wanted to create was behavioral economics around the small chance to win something,” Haji explained. “The question was, can we really change people’s habits around money?”

Though SaveUp has fewer than one million users, a good test of whether it’s working is how frequently its existing users come back. Haji said that 20 percent of registered users who have linked their accounts (which is about two-thirds of the people who sign up, linking an average of six accounts) log in every single day. More than 40 percent come every week, and 60 percent come every month. And that’s with only a website and an iOS app (Android is coming).

SaveUp co-founder and CEO Priya Haji

The whole concept is a bit of a quirky idea, one that involved adapting the prize-linked savings programs, already popular in the U.K., to be legal in the U.S. But on a basic level, SaveUp makes sense: Instead of getting rewarded for spending more, or penalized for messing up payments, people get rewarded for saving more. Instead of making money on quarterly fees and penalties like a bank, SaveUp makes money from advertisers who help put up sweepstakes prizes that its users want to win.

The San Francisco-based company says it has helped users move $1 billion to savings and debt payments so far. About 40 percent of its users come from partnerships with credit unions, and soon it is adding a partnership with PayPal.

Haji said her favorite soundbite about her own business is, “this is a bit of gummy on the vitamin.”

Meanwhile, Mogl is an app that connects to users’ credit and debit cards, and lets them know whenever they pay for a meal at a participating restaurant that they get 10 percent of what they spent back, and can donate some or all of it to local food banks.

The loyalty part has been around for a while, but the charity component launched just at the end of November. So far, users have donated more than half of their cash back, buying nearly 600,000 meals for local food banks (at a cost of about 20 cents per meal).

“I always say we’re Toms shoes for food,” said Mogl CEO Jon Carder. You buy one meal for yourself, you donate one for someone who needs it.

Mogl is similar to another company I’ve covered, called The Spring, but it’s off to a bigger start, with 650 participating restaurants in San Diego (where Mogl is based), 500 in San Francisco, and 100 in Phoenix.

MOGL founder and CEO Jon Carder

Similar to SaveUp, Mogl also cuts distribution deals with credit unions, and a bunch of them are set to roll out in January. The service works best with Visa cards, sending a push notification within minutes of a restaurant submitting a transaction. With MasterCard and American Express, it takes three to five days, but that time should shorten in future updates, Carder said.

Though the food-donation program is just getting off the ground, Carder is unabashedly ambitious about its potential.

“I think within the next 24 months we will end hunger in at least one of the cities we’re in,” he said. “There will still be a hunger problem, but we can supply enough money so that food banks can provide a nice healthy meal to everyone who needs it.”

The next big step for companies like SaveUp and Mogl could be partnerships with major financial institutions. But that’s easier said than done. Another personal finance startup, BillGuard, spent the past two years trying to get banks to offer “antivirus for bills” as a service to their customers, before scrapping that plan to go straight to consumers with an app of its own.

SaveUp has raised $7 million from investors including BlueRun Ventures and True Ventures, while Mogl has raised $22 million total funding from investors including Avalon Ventures and Austin Ventures.

When the company first announced the plan, it targeted the number of job eliminations at 27,000 by October 2014 and later raised the figure to 29,000. But HP had suggested at its analyst meeting in October and again during its quarterly earnings call in late November that the cuts would affect 33,000 to 34,000 people.

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The program was disclosed in a trove of documents leaked yesterday and shared by the security researcher Jacob Appelbaum and the German news magazine Der Spiegel.

Here’s Apple’s statement in full:

Apple has never worked with the NSA to create a backdoor in any of our products, including iPhone. Additionally, we have been unaware of this alleged NSA program targeting our products. We care deeply about our customers’ privacy and security. Our team is continuously working to make our products even more secure, and we make it easy for customers to keep their software up to date with the latest advancements. Whenever we hear about attempts to undermine Apple’s industry-leading security, we thoroughly investigate and take appropriate steps to protect our customers. We will continue to use our resources to stay ahead of malicious hackers and defend our customers from security attacks, regardless of who’s behind them.

According to the Der Spiegel documents, DROPOUTJEEP is software that can be implanted on an iPhone. It provides SIGINT or signals intelligence including the ability to push and pull files from the phone, retrieve text messages, contact lists, voice mail messages, the phone’s location, and turn on the internal microphone and activate the camera. Data can be removed or “exfiltrated” as the slide reads, over wireless data connections.

Here’s another interesting line, which you can read in the original slide below. The initial version requires “close access methods,” which means you have to have physical access to the phone. This would suggest that there’s no way the NSA could be readily installing this on the millions of iPhones around the world and thus spying on them all.

However: The slide goes on to say that future versions of DROPOUTJEEP might be installed remotely, which implies over the air, without physical access.

Also important: The slide dates from October, 2008, back when the iPhone was still relatively new and running on iOS 5 an much earlier version of iOS*. There’s no indication as yet about any efforts by the NSA’s specialized teams in the Access Network Technology, or ANT division about later phones or later operating systems.

Here’s the original DROPOUTJEEPSLIDE from the NSA’s catalog.

*A few readers have reminded me that iOS 5 didn’t come on the scene until about 2011. I’ve asked Apple to clarify exactly which version of iOS was in use in the fall of 2008.

Michael Bromwich, the lawyer picked as Apple’s monitor, said in court documents filed Monday that Apple’s characterization of his team’s activities as a “roving investigation” in fact “bear no relation whatsoever to the activities we have attempted to conduct.”

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My concern is more personal and local: The NSA’s version of patriotism is corroding Silicon Valley. Integrity of our products, creative freedom of talented people, and trust with our users are the casualties. The dolphin in the tuna net is us — our industry, our work, and the social fabric of our community.

Product integrity is doomed when the NSA involves itself in the product development process. The scope of NSA’s activity here is unknowable. But what I hear from founders and other investors — never mind Reuters’ reporting about RSA Security, and Spiegel’s about backdoors in networking products — is beyond my worst expectations.

President Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence learned enough about the matter to give it a prominent place in their Dec. 12 report. A key recommendation: “the US Government should … not in any way subvert, undermine, weaken, or make vulnerable generally available commercial software.”

It’s incredible to me that this needs to be said at all. That it was phrased as a recommendation by a panel of professors and retired government officials rather than as an imperative truth shouted by Silicon Valley itself is sad. Truthful products come from the union of founders’ values and users’ needs. Letting NSA add “features” strips integrity away; it creates deceitful, incoherent products. Our ambition must be the opposite.

Inside our companies and research centers, talented minds are being conscripted into surveillance. Think about the software developers who wrote the code behind your email service. Or the team who built the guts of a blogging service’s geolocation features. Not one of them chose to work for the NSA. But their work has been co-opted, effectively turned into surveillance tools. The freedom of talented people to work for whom they choose, building what they choose, for the purpose they choose is being deleted. This is another deep violation of our community’s social fabric.

All this leads back to trust. Billions of people let Silicon Valley into their daily lives and they hug it close. They trust our products to find information, to get work done, to talk to each other, to buy and sell stuff, and to have fun. That trust is a decades-old endowment built up by inventor-founders from Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore through to the present day. The magic of compound growth works in our favor when trust is accumulating. But now we are making trust withdrawals every day as people around the world learn how the NSA has woven surveillance, search, and seizure into and around our products. This is the painful flip side of compound growth: The trust withdrawals compound, too.

Silicon Valley’s promise to people is simple and compelling: “We’ll build a bunch of things. Try our work; keep what you love, dump what you don’t love. We’ll learn from it and build on the stuff that you like best.” Sadly, the NSA undermines the promise at its foundation.

We do have options. Modify our user agreements to reinforce users’ property rights and expectations of privacy in their data to address the so-called “third-party doctrine.” Make architecture and encryption decisions that defend against upstream surveillance at the backbone. Appeal objectionable collection orders under Section 215 of the Patriot Act to the full Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the FISC Court of Review, and the Supreme Court, if necessary. Appeal National Security Letters (NSLs) in federal court if you believe warrantless requests for information are toxic to your values and your work.

All of us — founders, CEOs, boards, citizens — are allowed to hold opinions about what is right, and we can exercise our rights and freedoms to act accordingly. God knows we take full advantage of the rights and freedoms in the tax code; we should be at least as creative and engaged when it comes to existential threats to our work.

Smart patriots of the NSA are struggling with a basic question: Of all the ways to get a critical job done, which ways line up with our founding values? The NSA’s answer is deadly to Silicon Valley’s life’s work. That is 100 percent unacceptable.

Michael Dearing (@mcgd) is a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley and a consulting associate professor at Stanford University.

DeVaan is one of several longtime technical folks at Microsoft whose future has been unclear since a September reorganization of the Windows unit. That shuffling left DeVaan, testing lead Grant George and services head Antoine Leblond without clear roles at the company.

“Jon DeVaan has chosen to leave Microsoft to spend more time with his family,” Microsoft said in a statement on Monday. “Since he joined Microsoft in 1984, Jon contributed to important products and services across the company. We thank him and wish him and his family all the best.”
Of course, there have been some other big exits this year, including Windows unit head Steven Sinofsky and the impending retirement of CEO Steve Ballmer once his replacement has been hired.

DeVaan’s departure was reported earlier Monday by Seattle-area tech site GeekWire after DeVaan posted a goodbye letter on Facebook.

In that note, he reflected on his long tenure and some of the products he worked on including some of Microsoft’s early Mac products and the first Windows version of Excel. DeVaan also worked on the company’s TV efforts before being tapped to overhaul companywide engineering processes before his most recent work on Windows 7 and Windows 8.

We’re checking into whether any other execs from the Windows unit or elsewhere at Microsoft have decided that Jan. 1 would be a good time to start spending more time with their families.

Now we can see the catalog itself. Courtesy this post on Leaksource, you can flip through the numerous single-page descriptions of the NSA’s specialized hardware.

For example, there’s FEEDTHROUGH, a method for gaining access to firewalls from Juniper Network’s Netscreen product line. There’s also JETPLOW, which burrows into firewalls from Cisco Systems. In a stroke of irony that will not be lost on anyone, there’s HEADWATER, which is used on routers from China’s Huawei.

Here are a few more that caught my eye: NIGHTSTAND, a mobile Wi-Fi exploitation and insertion device “typically used where wired access to a target is not possible.” PICASSO is an otherwise typical, if outdated, GSM wireless phone (including two models from Samsung) that “collects user data, location information and room audio” and allows data to be collected via a laptop or via SMS “without alerting the target.”

And this one blows my mind: COTTONMOUTH-I. To the untrained eye, it looks like a typical USB plug at the end of an otherwise unremarkable USB cord. Inside there is a motherboard that provides a “wireless bridge into a target network as well as the ability to load exploit software onto target PCs.”

Here’s where to find it, if you want to look for yourself.

“It was important to make swift and impactful changes to ensure that our customers’ investments in BlackBerry’s infrastructure and solutions are secure,” Chen wrote in an op-ed for CNBC that posted on Monday.

Chen has made some key changes, most notably outsourcing a chunk of device manufacturing to Foxconn and reorganizing the company around a few key areas, including services for businesses, the BBM messaging product, the handset business and the world of non-phone devices that use the QNX operating system BlackBerry acquired a couple years back.

He’s also committed the company to being profitable by fiscal 2016, canceled some planned products and spiked plans for a major customer conference for 2014.

However, the bigger challenges remain those that BlackBerry has faced for several years now. While some BlackBerry-dependent businesses have remained loyal, many other corporations have opened up to iPhones and Android. Meanwhile, demand for new BlackBerry 10 phones has been anemic, leading BlackBerry to take huge charges reflecting the large volumes of unsold inventory for those products.

In his piece, Chen points out that BlackBerry remains the leader in the business of managing mobile devices, larger than upstarts Mobile Iron, Good and AirWatch combined.

“When it comes to enterprise, we’re still the leader,” Chen said. “Don’t be fooled by the competition’s rhetoric claiming to be more secure or having more experience than BlackBerry.”

Again, that’s true, but much of BlackBerry’s strength is tied to its past, with plenty of stock brokers and government workers carrying around devices running the older BlackBerry operating system (and many of those also carry an iPhone or Android for their personal stuff.)

BlackBerry has made some moves to transition its server software to manage those rival devices, in addition to BlackBerry phones. It has also, for the first time, allowed BBM to run on non-BlackBerry devices.

Chen also promised to continue to use QNX, which BlackBerry bought to form the basis of BB10, for non-phone devices.

“Already the dominant machine-to-machine technology of the automotive industry, new capabilities and cloud services are being unveiled at CES in January, and we’re looking toward adjacent verticals for expansion,” Chen said. There QNX is ahead of rivals, but faces increasing competition as Apple lands automakers for its iOS in the Car initiative and Google is reportedly aiming to do something similar with Android.

Wedge Partners figures China Mobile accepted about 100,000 preorders for the iPhone 5s and 5c during the first two days of availability.

Interestingly, that’s fewer than rival carriers managed when the devices first launched a few months back. In September, China Unicom racked up about 120,000 preorders and China Telecom about 150,000 for the 5s and 5c both.

How is it that China Mobile, which currently provides cell service to over 763 million customers, is pulling in fewer iPhone preorders than its smaller rivals? One thing to keep in mind: It’s still early and this is only a single estimate. Another: The 5s and 5c are two months old now, and China Mobile isn’t doing much to differentiate them on its network. According to Wedge, its subsidies are similar to China Telecom’s and slightly higher than China Unicom’s.

“What’s important to remember is these phones launched in September,” Wedge analyst Brian Blair told AllThingsD. “Now here we are several months later and there’s no subsidy being offered that’s so special that the preorders are off the charts. If this had been in September when the phone launched globally, I think the numbers would be a lot higher.”

An interesting observation to be sure — but only until we can answer the bigger question: What will sales look like when the 5s and 5c officially launch on China Mobile? Currently, estimates for 2014 iPhone sales on the carrier range from 17 million at the low end to 38.7 million at the high end.

The company said it is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and by the SEC for allegations that some former and current employees paid millions of dollars to win an IT contract with a Russian government agency. The investigations center on a 35-million-euro deal between a former HP subsidiary in Germany and the Russian General Prosecutors Office, and cover a time period beginning in 2001 and ending in 2006. The deal called for the HP subsidiary to install a new IT network at the Russian agency. The disclosure came in HP’s annual 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

German authorities have indicted four people involved in the deal, including two former and one current HP employee, on charges of bribery, breach of trust and tax evasion. In the U.S., the DOJ has been investigating the deal under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. In the filing, HP also said that U.S. regulators, as well as those in Mexico and Poland, are investigating other bribery allegations relating to deals with certain public sector agencies in those countries.

HP said in the filing that it is cooperating with all the agencies probing the Russian deal, and is in talks with U.S. authorities to resolve the matter. The investigations first surfaced in 2010.

It has been a tough couple of years for U.S. tech companies coping with bribery cases. Last year, Oracle paid $2 million to settle a case in India. And IBM ran into difficulties with a U.S. judge reviewing its proposed $10 million settlement with the SEC of bribery allegations surrounding dealings in China and South Korea. Earlier this year, authorities in the U.S. launched an investigation into alleged kickbacks by a Microsoft representative in China, and its relationship with resellers in Italy and Romania.

The management changes are the latest of Acer’s efforts to pull itself out of a major crisis as sales of tablets and smartphones eclipse those of personal computers.

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When news surfaced two weeks ago of a fresh round of restrictions that China was placing on businesses transacting in the bitcoin ecosystem, the value of bitcoin plummeted.

The CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index, for example, showed that bitcoin traded as low as $422 around Dec. 18, when the large Chinese exchange BTC China acknowledged that it wasn’t accepting new deposits in the local currency until it could find a new payment processor that would do business with it.

But a funny thing has happened since then: Bitcoin hasn’t experienced an all-out crash. Instead, its value has recovered. A lot.

As of this writing, CoinDesk’s index, which takes the average of bitcoin trading values from three global exchanges (not including BTC China), pegs the value of bitcoin at about $755. That’s a 79 percent increase in a little less than two weeks.

The digital currency is trading a bit lower on BTC China, which still isn’t accepting new deposits, at about $723, but its value has recovered a bunch in the last two weeks.

So, is bitcoin suddenly so resilient that one government’s restrictions can’t topple the whole ecosystem? Or are there artificial safeguards propping the value up? It could be a combination of two.

On one side, it’s clear bitcoin demand has increased across the globe in recent months. But at the same time, BTC China has instituted some changes to its business in the last two weeks, in what seems like an attempt to keep its users from fleeing, that may be affecting pricing.

BTC China CEO Bobby Lee published a post on Dec. 20, the day after he told AllThingsD that he was still searching for a way to take new deposits and keep his exchange afloat, outlining some changes to the exchange.

The first was a bitcoin wallet that the company says would keep customers’ bitcoin stored safely.

The second change was reinstituting trading fees that had been waived for some time, in an effort to “reduce speculation and price volatility.”

“We strongly believe that the regulators want to see Bitcoin develop in a more stable manner in China, without the high volatility in prices,” Lee wrote. “We believe that Bitcoin can continue to thrive in China if the prices are more stabilized.”

Whether that’s the case remains to be seen. Of course, few people would argue that the volatility in price is a good thing for a more mainstream adoption of bitcoin as a payment method.

Either way, the last two weeks have proven one thing: Bitcoin is a lot harder to topple than almost anyone could have expected just six months ago.

A day late, but here’s the last installment of highlight posts from AllThingsD staffers, as we reach twilight on Dec. 31 and this site is no more.

As one of my fave depressing funeral poems goes:

“Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there; I do not sleep.”

Actually, I don’t sleep, since I am a blogger and, as you all must realize by now, a sparkly vampire, too.

Thus, like the undead, we’ll be reanimated in another form and with a new name right quick. And, not to worry, the archives of what we have written since mid-2007 will also forever remain as definitive proof that we existed, thanks to the hard workers at the NSA in its ongoing quest to suck every digital scrap it can find!

But before The Wall Street Journal redirects this site’s URL to its own tech coverage, here are some stories by John Paczkowski, the very first editorial hire Walt Mossberg and I made here, as well as some choice bits by me over the years (Yahoo, Yahoo and, well, mebbe some Yahoo, too!).

JOHN PACZKOWSKI

1. Who Will Buy Palm? If Not HTC, How About HP?

Key lines: “With handheld sales that fell by more than half year-over-year in its first quarter, HP is surely looking for a way to revive them and capture a larger portion of the important mobile market. Acquiring Palm could be a good way to do it.”

2. Google and the Evolution of Search I: Human Evaluators

Key lines: “Google had finally acknowledged that its search results were no longer solely and automatically determined by the company’s vaunted algorithms. Now they simply “relied heavily” on them. Why the sudden change?”

3. RIM CEO Welcomes Critics to Happy-Fun Rainbow Land

Key lines: “Despite a slew of evidence to the contrary — plunging market share, rapidly deteriorating fundamentals, mass layoffs and a stock that’s falling like a knife, Research In Motion’s got a bright future ahead of it. This according to CEO Thorsten Heins, who says RIM is headed for a rebound, not certain doom. In fact, he crowed in an op-ed piece in the Globe and Mail, ‘We expect to empower people as never before.’”

4. New Motion Control Patent Could Shake Up Smartphone Industry

Key lines: “Here’s a potentially noteworthy development in the patent litigation-riddled mobile device market. Last week, the United States Patent and Trademark Office issued a very broad patent on motion-based smartphone control, one that could have significant implications for the industry.”

5. Apple Maps App Takes Reality Distortion to a Whole New Level

“Apple may some day deliver a mobile mapping application that bests Google’s, but the new Maps app in iOS 6 — the latest iteration of its mobile operating system — isn’t it. Not yet, anyway.”

KARA SWISHER

1. Dear Jeff Bezos, Here’s What I Saw as an Analog Nobody in the Mailroom of the Washington Post

“One could say hindsight is 20-20, of course, but what made me sad about the sale — and I was very sad when I heard of it — was that these laudable and smart people could not seem to figure it out, and had to turn to a magical Internet wizard to do so. In the coverage, that sentiment was echoed again and again — that you would somehow conjure up a series of fantastic new news products that would capture the imagination of all and return the paper to its former glory.”

2. Liveblogging Yahoo’s 3Q Earnings: Busy, Busy, Busy (So Go Away, Tim Armstrong!)

Key lines: “[CEO Carol] Bartz then asked the question: ‘What have we done to re-engineer Yahoo?’ She reeled off a list she has repeated many times before, the point of which was to let us all know she has been mighty busy cleaning up the big mess she had to deal with on arrival. So lay off, all you naysayers! It’s kind of like what President Barack Obama is saying these days, as he looks forward to huge political losses in the upcoming election. It’s apparently a disciplined approach. “First you walk, then you run.’ Then, she added, you FLY! Don’t look down, Carol!”

3. What Not to Do in Hong Kong (Trust Me on This One)

Key line: “How shall I put this as delicately as I am known for: So I went to AsiaD in Hong Kong and all I got was this lousy transient ischemic attack.”

4. In 2009 Interview, Yahoo CEO Does Not Deny He Has a CS Degree, and Calls Himself an “Engineer” (Audio)

Key lines: “‘Your bachelor’s degree is in accounting and computer science. Now, from both of those, I mean that’s, that’s pretty obvious that’s PayPal,’ said [Moira] Gunn. ‘What are the most important things you learned?’ ‘Yeah,’ begins [Yahoo CEO Scott] Thompson, failing to correct her at all on the fact that he does not actually have a computer science degree — only one in accounting.”

5. CrunchFund? Unethical Ventures? Pig Pile Partners? No Matter What You Call It, It’s Business as Usual in Silicon Valley.

Key lines: “First, my initial reaction when I first heard about the deal: Ugh. Sigh. Hopelessly corrupt. Now 100 percent more icky! A giant, greedy, Silicon Valley pig pile. I was upset. By early evening, after my kids told me to chillax, my dark mood had changed to accept that the transaction — however profoundly distasteful to me — was part and parcel of the insidious log-rolling, back-scratching ecosystem that has happened in every other center of power in the universe since the beginning of time. And so it goes in Silicon Valley.”

According to the National Retail Federation, gift-card spending this holiday season was expected to reach an all-time high. Eighty percent of consumers said they planned to buy these oh-so-personal pieces of plastic.

But, as we all know, gift cards often go unspent — or half-spent, with a nominal balance left on them for all of retail eternity. So if you’d rather turn them in for cash or another brand-name gift card, this column might help you out.

What follows are some possible questions about how online gift-card exchanges work. My answers are based on conversations with three different gift-card-exchange companies, along with information supplied by the NRF and online retail giants like Apple and Amazon.

My grandmother thought it was a good idea to give me a baby-store gift card as a hint (I don’t have kids). But the store won’t take the card back and give me cash. Which websites will buy it from me?

The sites I used for my reporting are Cardpool.com, CardCash and the relatively new Raise.com. These all perform two functions: They let you sell your unwanted gift cards, and they’re also a marketplace in which you can buy used or discounted cards.

But if you Google “gift card exchanges,” you’ll get a dozen more results, including websites like GiftCardRescue.com, ABCGiftCards.com and even GiftCardGranny.com. (PlasticJungle.com, a previously well-known gift-card discount site, has shut down.)

I’ll say this: A lot of these websites look like they could use a makeover. I found Raise to be one of the exceptions, having a nicely designed, easy-to-navigate website.

But more important than the aesthetics is the validity of the websites, and what their fee structures are. So you’ll want to evaluate those carefully.

Can I get the full amount back if I sell the card through one of these sites?

Generally, no. These exchanges either charge a listing fee or take commission on the sale of the card. So either way you’re losing out a little bit.

Raise acts like a kind of StubHub for gift cards, letting you list your unwanted gift card at your own price.

For example, Raise, which acts like a StubHub for gift cards, does let you set your own price for the card, as long as the list price doesn’t exceed the value of the card. But Raise also charges a $1 fee to list a physical card in its marketplace. Then, if a person buys your card from the Raise market, the company deducts a 15 percent commission.

CardCash, on the other hand, will buy your unused gift card from you outright — so you don’t have to wait for another person to buy it. But the difference is that CardCash will offer you anywhere from 65 to 90 percent of the value of the card, depending on market demand. Cardpool and others work similarly. When I went to list a $25 Dunkin’ Donuts gift card on Cardpool, the site offered me $20 for it.

I only have $.67 left on a Trader Joe’s card. Can I sell that?

Some services set a minimum amount. Raise requires that cards have at least $10 on them before you list the card on the marketplace. Cardpool has a set minimum of $25. But CardCash will take any amount — so, yes, even your $.67 Trader Joe’s card.

Another well-intentioned family member bought me a gift certificate to a small local restaurant. But I’m from out of town. Can I sell the gift card even if it’s not a chain restaurant?

Most exchanges only accept gift cards for national or regional brands. Raise allows you to list gift cards from local businesses — but, of course, the market for it will be smaller, and it may not sell.

Do I have to actually go to the post office to mail the cards out once I decide to sell them? And do I have to pay for shipping?

Some exchange sites now offer e-cards or vouchers as a way to buy and sell gift cards more immediately, but it depends on each store or merchant (dealing with e-cards can make these sites more vulnerable to fraud issues).

CardCash will buy your gift cards from you outright — at 60 percent to 85 percent of the card’s value.

Otherwise, you’re going to have to drop your card off at the post office or a local mailbox, and you might have to pay for a stamp or shipping. It’s advisable that you pay a little bit more for shipping with tracking, even though that means you’re spending money to get money.

How long will it take for me to get my money? And in what form will it arrive?

In most cases, you’re going to have to take a leap of faith and mail the gift card before you receive payment.

After the company or the individual buyer has received your gift card, it can take anywhere from 24 hours to one week to receive your payment. You usually have the option of getting paid via check or PayPal payments. You can even opt to be paid in Amazon gift cards — in fact, CardCash says if you accept the Amazon gift card as a payout, you can reap up to five percent more in “earnings.”

If you don’t receive payment, or if you’re the one buying a discounted gift card and you get a dud card, you may have been scammed by a third-party buyer. Some — but only some — sites have clear-cut policies that cover you in this instance, promising to pay the full amount of the sale to you within a certain time period.

I got a bunch of iTunes gift cards this holiday season. Can’t I just return these to the Apple Store for cash and avoid using these websites?

It’s not that simple. Apple states that you can’t redeem or return iTunes gift cards for cash at Apple.com or in Apple stores, except as required by law. (When I asked Apple what “required by law” meant, the company said that in the U.S. it’s on a state-by-state basis.)

The same goes for Amazon. The company said that gift cards can’t be “reloaded, resold, transferred for value or redeemed for cash, except to the extent required by law.”

Some gift-card websites will let you buy or sell e-cards, which means you won’t have to mail out the physical gift card, but it depends on each merchant.

The exceptions are a handful of states where consumers can legally be paid out if the card balance dips below a certain amount, usually $10 or less.

Okay. I guess I’ll use a gift-card exchange. But I hear a lot of horror stories about fraudsters. How can I avoid scams?

Raise says each gift card is verified at the time of listing and time of delivery. CardCash also claims to verify the balance of each card that is sold through its site. And Cardpool says it has invested a “large amount of money” into protection and security.

But you can really never be too careful. I asked the National Retail Federation this same question, and the organization’s response was clear: The best way to avoid scams is to refrain from using third-party exchanges, as some sites don’t verify balances.

If you do end up using a gift-card-exchange site, “We would recommend doing a lot of homework before,” NRF spokeswoman Kathy Grannis says, “making sure you know the policies and verification process before buying or trading a gift card through third parties.”

Feature photo courtesy of Rivka YYZ/Flickr Creative Commons.

Now, though, researchers in parts of Antarctica have a mobile communication option that goes beyond pricey satellite phones. A new system from Range Networks allows researchers to use ordinary cellphones to connect with one another, and even to the rest of the world, thanks to a satellite connection located at the base station.

The system replaces what essentially were walkie-talkies that were used by researchers when away from their desks. And, unlike a satellite-only approach, the Range Networks system keeps the researchers connected to one another, regardless of whether there is a satellite signal.

“If there is any loss of connectivity to the outside world, the group can still talk to one another,” said Jacob Winkler, who heads sales and business development for Range Networks.

The system, which can handle 400 mobile phones (along with 800 desktop-based IP phones), is also designed to handle data traffic from various sensors.

While Antarctica presents some unique challenges, Range Networks is using basically the same approach it has gone with to connect other remote corners of the globe, including Oaxaca, Mexico; Papua, Indonesia; and parts of southern Zambia. Among the hallmarks of the Range Networks approach is its use of off-the-shelf GSM cellphones and the open-source software known as OpenBTS that runs on its base stations.

The Antarctic project began roughly a year ago on Macquarie Island, with plans now in place to expand to the Antarctic mainland as well as to those aboard a steel-hulled research vessel.

LG bought webOS, a mobile-device operating system, from Hewlett-Packard Co. earlier this year. The operating system was originally developed by Palm Inc. to power smartphones that would compete with the likes of Apple Inc.’s iPhones. H-P acquired Palm in 2010 and used webOS to power a tablet and its smartphone models. But the system failed to gain traction with the developers who write apps for devices and the devices didn’t sell well.

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There are a bunch of great comics and also an inexplicable drone, which seems to be taking pictures of the various cool cars that the comic employs in the show.

It works for me:

Usually I tend to avoid these stories because there are too many of them. But I was attracted to this one in part because of its balance of the cynical and the not-cynical, and by the source of the survey data: The CIOs of large corporations.

It comes by way of Sierra Ventures, the enterprise-focused venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, Calif. For years that firm has maintained a network of about 70 CIOs at some of the world’s biggest companies, and has routinely sought their input on their needs from directly in the corporate IT trenches. Sierra has in turn allowed that advice to help guide its investment decisions and how it helps its portfolio companies grow.

Recently it held its annual CIO Summit, and the time came to ask about 40 of those CIOs what was on their minds. The result was a simple survey with one key question: What were the most overhyped and underhyped technologies being hawked to large enterprises during the year? The answers were pretty clear and, at least in the overhyped category, close to unanimous.

The most overhyped, in their view, were social tools aimed at the enterprise. This would include products like Jive, Microsoft’s Yammer, Salesforce.com’s Chatter, Moxie, VMWare’s Socialcast and a host of others.

Their reasoning, as Al Campa, a partner at Sierra Ventures put it, was equally simple: “They don’t feel there’s any evidence for a return on investment or ROI,” he said. “It just didn’t move the needle for them when compared to other technologies they looked at.”

It’s a kind of predictable answer where CIOs are concerned, but not chief marketing officers, or CMOs, said Tim Guleri, a managing partner at Sierra Ventures. “CIOs are all about controlling spending and driving down their costs and finding money to fund innovation elsewhere,” he said. “That’s different than CMOs, who are trying to drive branding and reach. They feel differently about the social tools” and are therefore more willing to experiment with their growing tech budgets.

Okay then. So what was underhyped? There were two answers, both of them kind of intertwined: Mobile and security.

Mobile technology was underhyped, the survey’s respondents said, because of the way it can change business processes that are specific to a given industry. If you’re a hotel chain, how you use smartphones and tablets in your day-to-day operation will differ from how a manufacturing or logistics company does it. The CIOs who took part in the survey, Guleri says, were united in saying that understanding this “vertical context” is incredibly important to their business. Once you establish that, the ROI is usually pretty clear.

But going mobile raises a lot of security questions, which brings us to the second underhyped technology of the year. All those mobile devices fundamentally change the security landscape. “The perimeter that you used to be protected is gone,” Guleri said. Mobile devices open up the possibility for a lot of methods for attacking corporate systems. “There’s a lot of pain and potential for innovation around security,” he said.

Of course much of this is pretty intuitive if you’ve been paying attention to the overarching trends in the corporate IT environment of the last few years. CIOs are often surveyed about their opinions, but it’s a little bit unusual for them to show quite so much unanimity as they appear to have done here.

Next week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Google and German auto maker Audi plan to announce that they are working together to develop in-car entertainment and information systems that are based on Google’s Android software, people familiar with the matter said.

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This according to NPD Group, who said this week that sales of laptops running Google’s Chrome OS accounted for 21 percent of all commercial preconfigured notebook sales through November 2013.

It would seem, then, that Chromebooks have begun to hit their stride. Indeed, Amazon said this week that two out of its three top-selling laptops during the holiday season were Chromebooks designed by Samsung and Acer. No hard numbers there, sure. But certainly anecdotal evidence in support of NPD’s metric.

The year-over-year growth NPD has charted appears, then, to be significant. And evidently it’s coming at Microsoft’s expense, though machines running Windows did account for 34.1 percent of all commercial preconfigured notebook sales during the same period.

Said NPD analyst Stephen Baker, “Tepid Windows PC sales allowed brands with a focus on alternative form factors or operating systems, like Apple and Samsung, to capture significant share of a market traditionally dominated by Windows devices.”

Released on Dec. 17, Twitter version 10.2.2 for BB10 brought with it several enhancements, among them improved search, BlackBerry Messenger connectivity, and timeline photo previews.

Unfortunately, it arrived with so many bugs that BlackBerry was forced to remove it from its BlackBerry World app store. The update had been available for just 10 days.

BlackBerry says that it is actively investigating the issues behind the update’s instability, and will repost it when they’re resolved. In the meantime, the company is encouraging users who installed Twitter version 10.2.2 to downgrade to 10.2.1.