These aren't new to the world, but they are new to me this year, and a lot of them sort of hit some sort of "usable by those without active interest in the continuation of said tech".

1. Mongodb -- This year it really hit its stride and have been able to use it without worry for storing test results and experimental data. This is much nicer than the textfile logs -> sql -> processing datapath I was using previously.

2. flask: this little framwork is in my sweetspot. It does all the annoying crap of webby stuff, without all the "use our orm/routing model/way of thinking of http" so common in the space

3. mongrel2: I like it because it uses 0mq as the backend and sanely integrates some components in a way I feel could be better for many use cases than traditional stacks.

4. 0mq: This gets special mention, because it has been around for a while and I was actively using it, but 0mq 2 came out sometime this year, and is different enough from the first round, that it could be considered a separate technology. It isn't revolutionary in the MOM space, but it is a cool lightweight approach, and the core team has the type of dedication I like to see in OSS projects.

5. ABSOLUTELY NOT NEW: Haskell -- this year is the first year I've had time to sit down with Haskell for real, and start understanding the weird FP thing. This has made everything I do feel shiny and new, because even though I never actually use Haskell, I find myself writing very short hsskell programs in python and c and the other languages I use in my day job. When I started coding I remember thinking "This must be what a wizard feels like!", Haskell has brought back that feeling for me.