2013's Biggest Tech Moments, Told In Photos

2013 was the year of the Phablets; phones nearing tablet-size (or is it tablets nearing phone-size?) with names like "Sony Xperia X Ultra" and "HTC One Max." Surprisingly controversial for devices, they've been called everything from "a monstrosity of tackiness" to an "ugly beast"…but their market share continues to rise.

Paying off government loans nine early? Check. First profit after ten years of labor? Check. Highest safety rating in the history of automobiles? Check. Yeah, maybe the batteries sometimes burst into flame, but Tesla Motors has never been more successful. Will 2013 be the year of the electric car? Only time will tell.

Elon Musk's ambitious transportation plans didn't end with Tesla Motors. In August, Musk revealed his plans for the Hyperloop, a tunnel through the earth that, courtesy of nonintuitive physics, could transport a passenger from Los Angeles to San Francisco in just 30 minutes (for comparison, the world's fastest train would take an hour and 20 minutes to make the same trip). Critics have come out in droves (and really, the motion sickness issue does seem…pressing) but that hasn't stopped startups from trying to jump-start the process.

Who knew the most hotly-criticized thing the Obama administration would do this year would be a website? Forget the budget, NSA or drone wars; the furor over the Healthcare.gov website is incredible. Admittedly, the website's design is atrocious: bewildering, labyrinthine and frequently unworkable, it's turned what could have been Progressive's triumphant rollout of Obamacare into an ongoing technical fiasco. That said, given the GOP shut down the government over Obamacare's mere passage, it's perhaps no shock that the health care's implementation has been criticized as harshly as it has.

Microsoft's new Xbox One came shackled with restrictions; gamers couldn't play used games and had to own a Kinect and "check in" online every 24 hours to use the console. The gaming community seemed resigned until PlayStation's competing Playstation 4 demoed with none of the same restrictions. Cue a war of the game consoles -- and Microsoft eventually stripping nearly all the onerous restrictions from the Xbox One.

The Darknet, a network of hidden websites only accessible via anonymizing services like the Tor Web Browser, found itself uncomfortably in the spotlight this year. In August, the FBI and Irish police cooperated to arrest Eric Eoin Marques, allegedly the founder of Freedom Hosting, one of the largest hosting services on the Darknet. The FBI followed up 3 months later by arresting Ross William Ulbricht, a.k.a "Dread Pirate Roberts," the founder of the Silk Road, the world's largest Darknet drug bazaar. While no one has yet stepped up publicly to replace Marques yet, the Silk Road recently reappeared on the Darknet, led by a brand new Dread Pirate Roberts.

In 2009, an anonymous inventor released the first iteration of "Bitcoin," a digital currency "mined" by computers solving cryptographic puzzles. For five years, Bitcoin catered to currency freaks, at best a niche obsession -- until Spring 2013, when austerity measures in Cyprus prompted a meteoric rise in Bitcoin's value. Today, a single Bitcoin trades for just over $500.

Buh-bye Zynga, we've found a new gaming obsession; King.com's Candy Crush. One in every 23 Facebook users plays it. It's been downloaded 500 million times (that's more downloads than people in the U.S.). It's inspired countless cakes, Halloween costumes and enough Twitter posts to fill 45,000 novels. Want in on the sweetness? Candy Crush's creator, King.com, has apparently filed for a secret IPO, according to the U.K. Telegraph.

Want to share a picture? Fear it'll embarrass later? Look no further than Snapchat, the most dominant of a plethora of temporary social media apps all built around the same idea; self-deleting media can save us from humiliation. Snapchat got a Bloomberg cover and subsequently became the target of shocked articles when it turned out that one could, under certain circumstances, screenshot Snapchats without the sender knowing. Still, the temporary social media boom shows no sign of fading just yet...so let's enjoy it while we can?

The Huffington Post reported earlier this year that small businesses were experimenting with drones, but even we didn't see this coming: on December 1st, Amazon.com unveiled an octocopter fleet designed to deliver packages a half hour after they're ordered. Two days later, the Verge revealed the U.S. Postal service also has a drone fleet in the works. Sadly, drone-borne package delivery is still several years off; for that you can blame the U.S. government. The FAA's not even scheduled to release civilian drone regulations until 2015.

Not long after the U.K. Guardian started releasing documents from the NSA, Lavabit, the privacy-conscious email provider used by Edward Snowden, received a subpoena for the encryption keys that kept Lavabit email private. Lavabit founder Ladar Levison responded by shutting down his service. Silent Circle — a company that helps users encrypt their phone calls and text messages so they can't be intercepted — soon followed suit. Shortly afterwards, Silent Circle and Lavabit teamed up to create Darkmail, an open-source secure email service that's currently raising money on Kickstarter. Silent Circle founders Phil Zimmermann and Mike Janke, left, are pictured here.

Twitter has been held responsible for riots and revolutions — and this year it became a publicly traded company. Stock price supposedly started at $26; by the end of Twitter's first day of trading, the stock was worth $44.90. It hasn't gone below $40 since.

Bangles make way! The wrist is now the site of a whole new suite of gadgets. It seems like every other electronics manufacture in 2013 came out with a smartwatch, a time piece that also takes texts, tracks location and provides biometric readouts. But smart watches also got competition this year; fitness bracelets are also on the rise, gadgets from sporting companies meant to promote a healthy lifestyle via sleep, step and calorie trackers. May the war of the wrists begin!