While Palm's share price will appear cheap to investors—the stock fell by about half in 2007—many will wait to see some tangible progress on new products before putting money into the company.

Palm's new Centro smartphone has been generating some positive buzz, but the company will need more than one success to right its sinking ship.

Facing the Music

After the Beacon "social advertising" disaster, many are convinced that Zuckerberg lacks the experience to run a $1 billion company, let alone a $15 billion company. While Zuckerberg apologized for the Beacon fiasco—more for the company's handling of the incident than the underlying privacy issue—it's just not evident that he is capable of leading the company to the payout he seeks.

Although Facebook's origins at Harvard are contested, Zuckerberg clearly had the vision and drive to build the company into the hottest social network on the Web. But if he wants his company to successfully go public—potentially earning him billions—he'd better bring in an experienced technology executive to run the business, much like Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page did by tapping former Sun veteran Eric Schmidt.

Google, it appears, turned out just fine by pursuing this strategy. Facebook's No. 1 priority in 2008 should be to increase its user base—which will swell with older users—and prevent an upstart from usurping its status as the hottest social network, much as it did to MySpace.