If you watched the tech markets in 2007, you saw turmoil in some companies and triumph in others. Of course, I'm talking about stock prices first and foremost. The market can be unforgiving. Earnings in line with expectations can cause a stock to shrink while beating expectations by even a penny per share can cause a stock to rise. It's all about context in the industry.

So, how about some winners in 2007. Let's list them here courtesy of Om Malik: Research In Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM), up 166.3%; Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN), up 134.8%; Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL), up 134.7%, Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG), up 50.2%, Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT), up 20.9%, eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY), up 10.4% and Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO), down 8.9%. Wait -- why is Yahoo! in there? So a comparison to 2008 performance can be made a year from now.

Why did the stock prices of all these companies shoot up so high in 2007? Research In Motion continued taking the crown in mobile e-mail, Apple released the iPhone, Google continued phenomenal growth every quarter . . . you get the picture. Yahoo! was the lone loser out of the above group based on it continuing to lose ground to Google, the weak response to its new search engine platform and the ousting of former CEO Terry Semel after a few years of disappointing results. The other companies saw share gains for one reason or another. Will all of them see more gains at the end of 2008? You make that call now -- and add to your portfolio if you have the itch.

Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and Internet pioneer, is not too happy with how the Internet's infrastructure is evolving. Cuban points out how "each generation to whom the invention was a breakthrough it may have been heretical to consider those inventions 'dead and boring'. The reality is that at some point they stop changing. They stop evolving. They become utilities or utilitarian and are taken for granted."

Cuban points out that until bandwidth throughput to the home reaches far higher numbers, the Internet is dead, as the platform is not evolving fast enough to allow really smart people to come up with groundbreaking ideas. Throughput to the home has not increased more than 5mbs in the past 5 years, and few people's throughput is going to increase to more than 10mbs in the next 5 years, he noted.

GigaOm.com's Om Malik agrees, saying most of the smart people who orginally built out the Internet are now developing the content and not the infrastructure. All the smart people who built the equipment and the pipes are now building Web 2.0 products.

Malik goes on to say "the future, however, is in two-way, symmetrical Internet, where applications such as Kyte.TV and Sling Media can actually be put to use." Malik goes into much greater detail, which should be required reading for those who are investing in technology and the Internet. The blogs can be found at GigaOm.com and BlogMaverick.com. Both Cuban and Malik agree the Internet's infrastructure is due for a serious wake-up call.

This week, the Wall Street Journal wrote about how venture capital is starting to seep into the blogosphere ("Bloggers Find Financial Backers For Their Independent News Sites").

Deja vu  all over again?  Interestingly enough, back in the 1990s, there was a flood of money that flowed into content deals. Yes, some journalists were becoming dot-com multimillionaires. However, when Nasdaq collapsed, so did many of these ventures.  In fact, there was a book on the topic -- Starving to Death on $200 Million – which chronicled the implosion of the Industry Standard.

So, to use an ominous phrase:  is this time different?  Perhaps so.  Actually, the attraction of blogs is that they are fairly low cost.  This makes it possible to make money from niche categories.  Also, it is fairly easy to scale-up (since bandwidth is extremely cheap).

Some examples of recent financings:  Alan Patricof, who invested in Apple at the start-up phase, has put his own money in PaidContent.org; True Venture Partners invested in GigaOm.com, a popular blog by Om Malik, a writer for Business 2.0 (which is a publication of Time Warner); and Mark Cuban, who sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo!, invested in Sharesleuth.com.

"Gas prices are just going up, up, up, just like Google stock, baby, just like the Google stock," says Om Malik in his podcast with Niall Kennedy. eBay isn't, and in fact it is considering partnering with Microsoft (or maybe that's just a rumor it is putting out there for more bargaining power with Google).

eBay isn't working hard enough to improve the user experience, says Niall, and despite the coolness of Skype and Paypal, the core business - the auction business - is really where it needs to grow if the company is going to continue to increase its earnings.

What does eBay need to do to accomplish that? Simple, Niall and Om tell us, do these five things:

1. Integrate Paypal with the same address system, and with other services like Evite;
2. Develop a shareware application;
3. Have the ability to resell digital media like iTunes (maybe this is what they're thinking about with the Skype deal?);
4. Create a separate eBay 2.0 company that helps facilitate digital assets;
5. Buy Quicken and add it on to the eBay product line.

Of all these I like the ideas about Quicken and the Paypal integration the best. What do you think?