Besides giving us a new President, last week’s election gave America’s television networks a whole lot of new tech toys.The biggest buzz has been about CNN’s holograms. Were they actually holograms or were they tomograms, the technology used in CAT scans? Did the technology add anything to the coverage or was it just silly and expensive? Is it true that CNN actually tweaked the hologram to make it glow and look less polished and more grainy? How did the CNN technology work?

According to Chuck Hurley, the guy at CNN who managed the technology, the famed “CNN hologram” is really just beefed-up chroma-key technology.   And yes, they added the blue glow around the reporter so viewers would understand that they were seeing a projection and not a real person. It looked like a hologram, Wolf Blitzer called it a hologram, but it was really just a 3-D image taken with more than 30 high definition cameras and knitted together by over 20 computers in real time. That’s no simple task.

But perhaps  the most interesting tech to come out of this election is the popularization of Jeff Han’s Multi-Touch Collaboration Wall better known as CNN’s Magic Wall.  Not only because of the way CNN reporter John King was able to navigate the map with ninja dexterity, but also because it inspired one of the funniest SNL technology skits since the days when Jimmy Fallon played Nick Burns, your company’s computer guy.

If you haven’t seen Fred Armisen’s skit, here you go!

This week’s buzzword is CutOutDissection.com. In case you missed the news, a 19 year old PETA intern named Jennifer Thornburg legally changed her name to CutOutDissection.com.  Here’s her driver’s license.

Now, Jennifer…er CutOut…. changed her name for an altruistic reason. She wanted to bring attention to a cause — in this case, stopping animal dissection in schools.  I can understand that.  With all the 3-D software we have available today, why not have students virtually dissect a rat or frog or pig?  I applaud Jennifer for thinking of such a clever way to focus attention on a cause she believes in.

But here’s the hitch. How long do you think it will be before someone legally changes their name to Ask.com?  (And not for altruistic reasons, either!)  In a marketing climate where you can shrink shrink wrap your car in advertising for a few extra dollars a month or tattoo the name of a casino on your forehead for $10,000, it’s only a matter of time.

What is MoSoSo?   It’s a cool, hip abbreviation for Mobile Social Software.  It’s not new, but it’s buzzworthy again because Dustin Moskovitzand (Facebook c0-founder) and Justin Rosenstein (Facebook and Google) announced they were leaving Facebook to go work on a project that’s expected to be some kind of social networking appplication for business.  According to Justin’s blog:

As our visions for how productivity software could work came into alignment, we thought about building it inside of Facebook. It was an attractive option in many ways, and neither of us was eager to exit a company that was in such an exciting phase of its development. But at some point it became clear that doing so wouldn’t be good for Facebook or for us. Facebook needs to continue its mission of making the world more open through social software, without distraction, and the new project requires a company built around it from the ground up, with the goals of efficiency and group collaboration embedded deeply into its DNA from day 1.

So we’ve decided to leave Facebook (in about a month) and start a new company, to build an extensible enterprise productivity suite, along with a high-level open-source software development toolkit, built for the Web from the ground up.

What can we expect from a business-focused social networking application? It’ll be available from both your smartphone and your desktop. It’ll have GPS and Google Maps and presence technology that offers the user choices and control. It’ll address the privacy and security concerns that have prevented many businesses from taking Facebook seriously. 

So why couldn’t Dustin and Justin stay at Facebook and build their productivity software inside? My guess is that it’s because their new product will be subscription-based —  and unlike Facebook or any other social networking app so far — it will make money.

This week’s buzzword is XOHM.  (It’s pronounced like the word home with the letter z in front.)

What is it? XOHM is the WiMAX service that Sprint Nextel rolled out this week in Baltimore. What’s the big deal? Well,  for one thing, it’s the first time Sprint has targeted the home broadband market. If they get the WiMAX coverage right, it could blur the lines even more between home and mobile computing.  Best of all, it could shake up how the customer pays for Internet access.

According to the Sprint Web site, users who want to have a variety of XOHM devices for home and mobile use will pay $65 a month for both mobile and home modems.  (For users who only need XOHM once in awhile, Sprint is  offering service for $10 per day.)  Even if you don’t use Sprint, this paradigm shift in billing will most likely lower connection costs for everyone as vendors compete with each other for customers. That’s good news for all of us.

So what’s the hitch? The hitch is that XOHM is WiMAX (4G) and most of us have technology that can only use Wi-fi (3G).  If you live in Baltimore and you want to take advantage of XOHM,  you’ll need to do some shopping and upgrade your modem, data card, laptop and mobile device.

The other hitch is that WiMAX won’t be the only mobile broadband game in town for long. There’s another standard backed by Verizon and AT&T that’s on the way called LTE (3GPP Long Term Evolution3GPP Long Term Evolution). 

A lot of experts predict that chip makers will eventually support both WiMAX and LTE because they’re not all that different, but until that happens I guess we’ll all just sit back and watch to see whether Sprint can make this rollout a success.

This week’s tech buzzword is Jabber.  Jabber is another addition to the Cisco Software Family.  What? You thought Cisco was a hardware business? Think again.

When Cisco bought Jabber, the open source instant messaging app known for interoperability,  they didn’t just buy a corporate IM — they bought another key component for their vision of the future. A future where collaboration is built into the network rather than on top of it.

That’s right. While everyone’s been buzzing for months about Google and Microsoft and Yahoo,  Cisco’s been quietly rebuilding the bones of your network so you can get more value out of the infrastructure you already have in place.  Some people call the concept unified communications. Some people call it ubiquitous computing. It might just be simpler to call it Cisco Software.

Rumor has it that Cisco plans to include Jabber as part of its WebEx collaboration platform.  Makes sense. It fits in quite nicely with their telepresence technology too. The Jabber announcement comes less than a month after Cisco announced plans to buy PostPath, a Linux-based email and calendaring outfit, for $215 million.

Here’s my next prediction:  CISCO will buy Twitter.

In personal electronics, jailbreak is a synonym for hack. The purpose of a jailbreak to enable the use of 3rd party software on a proprietary device — of course, once you jailbreak your cell phone or MP3 player or nintendo game, you void the manufacturer’s warranty. The term gained popularity with the release of the first iPhone when determined users figured out how to unlock the phone from AT&T and use the phone with a SIM card from another carrier.