Week in review: Startup dreams crushed by Google, MySpace’s collective consciousness

Here’s our rundown of the week’s business and tech news. (Due to the holiday-shortened week, I’m including fewer posts than usual.) First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:
Nine startups dreams and industries Google crushed in 2009 – A lot of folks, from tiny startups to companies in established industries, found themselves in the search behemoth’s path this year. We looked back some of the dreams that were destroyed.
Apple’s new gadget is an e-reader, says latest rumor — There are reports that Apple’s new tablet computer has a specific purpose: It’s a Kindle-killer designed for reading books, magazines, and news on-the-go.
These are the ten best video games of the decade, dammit! — VentureBeat games writer Dean Takahashi compiles a list of his favorite games from the past 10 years, supposedly because his “annoyance [with other best of decade lists] built up so that it overflowed” and he “felt compelled to retaliate” by creating his own list.
Droid clobbers other Android phones in Xmas app downloads — More evidence that the new Droid is the king of the Android phones: On Christmas Day, the number of Android app downloads from the new Droid phones roughly equaled the number of downloads from all leading Android phones combined, according to a report from app market analysts Flurry.
And here are four more stories we thought were important, thought-provoking, or fun:

Peering into MySpace’s collective consciousness with real-time search — We look at the differences in how conversations play out on different online communities. Of course, our comparison is extremely unscientific, but it support speculation that class divisions are playing out on the web.

Our favorite horribly wrong or amusing tech covers — As everyone makes predictions about 2010 and beyond, we tried to provide some perspective by reminding readers of decades of bad predictions from the tech press. We’ll have our own predictions up soon, and some will certainly be wrong, but hopefully they won’t deserve too much ridicule a decade from now.
Stealthy C3 raises $26M to manage carbon, but what will it actually be doing? — C3 already seems to be setting itself apart by recruiting heavyweights like former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham for its board. The star power isn’t surprising, considering that the San Mateo, Calif., company was founded by Thomas Siebel — the man who sold Siebel Systems to Oracle for $5.7 billion.
Does voice-to-text technology actually work? — Voice-to-text technology is entering more and more industries, and has the potential to make recording, dictating and communicating a whole lot faster. But after trying out the different services available now, it’s clear that they’ve still got a long way to go.