Last week, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates took the stage together at the Wall Street Journal's All Things D conference, and what resulted was a nice look back at their history together. Not quite a lovefest, but no PC vs. Mac commercial smackdown either. An interesting interview from a historical perspective at least. Those wanting to look forward needed to watch the product announcements from both companies, along with one from Palm, to get a glimpse of what's next. Even if the announcements were more yawn than glee for the geek-inclined.

Microsoft announced the most ambitious tech product with their Surface line of tabletop PC's for commercial purposes. Great technology, but we've seen the demos from Jeff Hahn that showed us the promise of what this technology would be capable of once we - pun intended - got our hands on it. The Microsoft implementation shows us what T-Mobile and other large pocket companies will be able to do with it. I'm sure the world really does need an easier way to compare cell phones or order dessert, but until I can edit photos and go through my email on it this announcement doesn't really mean anything to me. Fabulous technology, can't wait until somebody let's the rest of us play with it.

Palm introduced the Foleo, a SmartPhone companion piece. Even without its obvious shortcomings, I'm not really sure what the point is. Yes, it's hard to type on the Treo - why bring attention to it? I wanted to like it, but... that same $500 will net me an iPhone. Which one would you buy? Yeah, me too.

Apple introduced YouTube integration with AppleTV, and a bigger hard drive in it too. They also added iTunes Plus capability to their music store along with Paul McCartney's back catalog. This week they've already announced a release date for the iPhone, and an update to the MacBook Pro line. I'm as excited as can be about the mercury free LED screens in the 15" MacBook Pro, and I can't wait to see Apple fulfill Job's promise of an all LED line of laptops and monitors, but Steve seems to just be clearing his palate ahead of next week's World Wide Developer's Conference (WWDC). I'll be there cramming my head full of all the new technologies and will report back anything that is relevant to the rest of us.

I was feeling a little disheartened by all of this, feeling like the tech world wasn't really paying attention to real people when I happened across  this post about the second annual NetSquared conference. It reminded me that there are people out there who are putting technology to use for the betterment of their communities. If you only pay attention to the headlines and don't dig a little deeper, it's easy to forget that it's not all about connecting teenagers to each other more - as if that's a problem to be solved anyway. It's not all about who can post the cutest animal clip on YouTube. It can be about enriching your community, or a community like yours on the other side of the world. It can be about making connections and making information available faster, easier and more broadly than ever before so that those who want to act on it will. It's even about letting the youngsters know that you're still around: