The early part of this decade witnessed the rise of a new commercial phenomenon, the bringing to market of many sub-$10 evaluation, prototyping and hobbyist boards. Although the terminology and market positioning has varied depending on the company, they're really all the same thing --- boards for enthusiasts, which serve the purposes of industrial evaluation equally well and also play a valuable company PR and device promotion role. It's all one category really, and it's very sensible to roll these diverse purposes into one because of economies of scale, inventory reduction, and audience synergy.
Probably the greatest mindshare in this $10 (ballpark) area has been obtained by three companies so far:
- Freescale with its Freedom boards FRDM-KL25Z and FRDM-KL46Z, featuring low-power Cortex-M0+.
- ST with its STM32Fx-Discovery range, often given away free, featuring high performance Cortex-M4.
- TI with its LaunchPad ranges, covering MSP430 (low power), C2000 (DSP), and Tiva/Hercules (ARM).
These devices are all, to summarize the $10 scene in a word, awesome. 
And that's probably understating it.
However, there is something missing from this excellent picture. It's a very important thing, and it's very bad that it is missing: networking. This new millennium was built on a solid foundation of networking created in the latter part of the preceding one. IP networking has so permeated our civilization today that its absence is as inconceivable as life without the telephone would have been in the preceding decades. And yet despite this, the above three pillars of awesomeness live on isolated islands of non-communication.
Yes I know, it's quite easy to integrate them into an IP network, either through USB-based NICs or wifi adapters or using a small I2C-connected Ethernet or wifi board, or even Bluetooth or NFC, or even using SLIP over RS232 from days gone by. But that's not the point. The point is that they are not inherently connected, and so they have to be brought in from the cold. This is more regrettable than it appears at first glance for several reasons. It's a barrier to instant networking, it costs a lot more (there's a dollar penalty owing to unnecessary overheads), networking is not directly supported in the otherwise-awesome board's software, the add-ons dilute the manufacturer's own device promotion, and to be blunt, it's just annoying and not forward-looking.
I would recommend to manufacturers in this $10 (ballpark) space that 2014 be their year for networking everything in sight. There's even a marketing angle for it --- the Internet of Things has acquired quite a lot of meme-space recently, and it's always a better idea to ride a wave rather than to stand in its way. Sub-$10 networked boards would be extraordinarily synergistic to the IoT concept --- it shouldn't surprise anyone if hundreds of millions of a single board are sold, because $10 falls wells under the price-worry radar in the West at least. I suspect the main limitation on sales would be effectiveness of promotion/advertising producing awareness, and not the price.
Come on Freescale, ST and TI (strictly in alphabetical order), add networking into this extremely cost-constrained niche, even if it's only 10Mbps. You can do it. And the rest of you manufacturers, don't worry about the incumbents ruling the roost. Word of mouth and reblogging is the primary form of advertising today (I'm even doing it right here), and if you provide the goods, we'll spread the interest.
Morgaine.
