As corporate America has reminded us, the daunting task of finding the right gift for your friends and family comes along with the holidays. While the best gifts are those from the heart, in case you’re looking for something a bit more tangible, there’s a lot of great stuff in stores this December. So, without further ado, here are a few of the top picks from my own Christmas list.

iPhone and iPod touch. Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last five months, you’ll doubtlessly have heard something about the iPhone. This classy smartphone is also remarkably well-built and sturdy; the iPhone and its little, phone-less cousin, the iPod touch, offer the best experience on a mobile device that I have ever encountered, hands-down.

Facebook, the incredibly ubiquitous social networking site, made its latest move in the struggle to make a buck on Wednesday. The company is calling its latest breed of marketing “social ads,” a system where your own expressed brand preferences and Internet browsing habits and even your very identity are used to pitch goods and services right back to you and your friends!

While I’m all in favor of the little guy — if Facebook can even be called that anymore — cashing in on its own success, I hope I’m not the only one that’s more than a little disturbed at privacy-invading advertisements.

Early this month, the stock price of Google shot above $600 per share, and its meteoric rise shows no signs of stopping — despite the fact that the price exceeds the company’s actual earnings by a factor of 50.

Meanwhile Facebook was recently valued at $10 billion dollars by the investors at Microsoft. However, estimates place its annual revenue in 2006 only in the millions, nearly 100 times lower than its crazy valuation.

The list goes on and on, of course. Online advertising company DoubleClick, a rare survivor of the first dot-com bubble, was purchased by Google for $3.1 billion in April, while YouTube was acquired last year for $1.65 billion, also without a clear revenue model — i.e. one that could justify the purchase price.

Back in February, I wrote an article in The Sun detailing Cornell’s plans to deal with Microsoft’s newest operating system, Windows Vista. This major upgrade to the Windows platform made many changes to the underlying system that rendered several programs, including our own Bear Access, inoperable without tricky work-arounds.

Now, despite all this, and despite CIT’s official recommendation to hold off on Vista for the time being, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to delve into next-generation technology.

Next January, the Federal Communi­­cations Commission will be conducting a very rare auction for the 700 megahertz band, a large portion of the radio frequency spectrum that has been used until now for television broadcasting. Since broadcasters on this frequency will be departing the airwaves for the realm of digital broadcasts in 2009, this relatively low-frequency, highly desirable part of the spectrum will be up for grabs for the first — and likely the last — time in decades.

Don’t expect the band to come cheap. The FCC has set a minimum reserve price of $4.6 billion on the item up for auction.

If you’ve been browsing the web at all this week, you’ll no doubt have heard something of the spat that is brewing between media giant NBC Universal and iPod manufacturer Apple, Inc. The two corporations have so far been unable to negotiate a new contract for the sale of NBC shows through Apple’s iTunes video store, and this disagreement came to a head last Friday, when Apple announced that it would be blocking the addition of any new NBC episodes to the store.

Hey everyone, my name is Chris Barnes, and I am the Web Editor at The Sun. This semester, I’ll be writing a column that takes a look at the technical side of life, both on the Hill and beyond. We live in a world that is becoming more and more dependent on the fast flow of information, and finding the right gadgets and software can be a big help in getting things done.