There are good reasons for a price increase this time. Here's whats different from last year:
Silk Road is doing 2mil/month
a 10mil company will be releasing the
BitcoinCard next year. 5 years of research have gone into this technology allowing a super-low-power credit card sized device to send texts, bitcoins, login info, and consumer data through an ad-hoc network instead of cell towers, at a card cost of only $10-$25
SatoshiDice has shown the potential of the bitcoin gambling market
BitInstant lets you buy bitcoins at walmart, 7-11, and CVS
There are many different bitcoin wallets for android and jailbroken iphones
There is a bitcoin stock market called
GLBSE that allows investing in 200 companies with bitcoins
The
Ellet is watch style wallet that will enable multiple payment methods and support bitcoin
Coinlab got 500k in venture capital
The Bitcoin Project (the main dev team) has announced that they will make a major announcement next month