A host of technologies is set to light up 2007, but interestingly none of them are completely new. All of our picks for the big tech plays of the next 12 months have been around for awhile. What’s new is the application of these advances. Take 2006 headline grabbers like the buyout of YouTube by Google for US$1.6 billion and the US$580-million purchase of MySpace by News Corp—neither of these were new last year, but look to how they’ll pop under their new owners. That said, predicting what’s ready for prime-time headlines in 2007 is still fun and worthwhile. Will this be the year mobile TV finally takes off in North America? Will VoIP live up to the hype? Will blogging self-destruct under its own weight? Is Apple ready to answer the call with an iPhone? We asked leading analysts, thinkers, observers and insiders for their thoughts on which technologies will have the greatest impact on businesses and consumers in 2007. Here’s what they said.

1.
Mobile is a great paradox. It frees and it enslaves; using a laptop and hand-held computer allows us to work anywhere, anytime, freeing us from the confines of an office, but never letting us escape the demands of work. That could change in 2007, said Tony Ovlet, vice-president of the communications practice at IDC. He believes a combination of software and hardware, tied to corporate policies which limit when it’s appropriate to contact an employee about work, will make this technology work for—rather than against—us. “We need to set parameters about what hours and what days it’s okay to talk work, and what days should be left alone,” said Ovlet, noting lots of companies talk about work-life balance but few do anything about it. Also, expect a huge disruption of the landscape when cellular number portability takes effect in March. It will allow subscribers in urban centres to take their phone numbers with them to any carrier. That, in turn, could force carriers to get creative with friendlier bundles in order to retain customers, said Ovlet, predicting there will be churn in the youth market where satisfaction levels are most unstable. With choice may come pricing models that make add-on services—texting, obile TV or email— more attractive, said Jesse Hirsh, blogger, TV host, CBC pundit and president and managing partner of Openflows Network. “Because, really, the carrier model is screwed up,” he said pointing to packages and rate plans in Canada which are among the most expensive in the world and make advanced features cost prohibitive. All of which means mobile providers should switch revenue focus from consumers to third-party advertisers and sponsors, according to a recent Consumers and Convergence Report from KPMG. Kathy Cunningham, of KPMG’s Information, Entertainment and Communication practice (ICE), said this is because North American consumers don’t see the value in hefty charges for Mobile TV or e-mail. She pointed to a worldwide survey of 3,576 mobile phone users which showed Asian and European users have adopted converged services such as mobile TV mainly because they commute long distances by public transit and are a captive audience. This is not as true in North America. “That survey found most Canadians didn’t want to download music by cellphone, but do want to watch short movie trailers. Carriers will have to carefully tailor content to what consumers want.” Having advertisers sponsor content for mobile users—like movie trailers, sports highlights or even previews of the evening’s TV shows—will gain more momentum in 2007 as carriers look for ways to keep their customer base happy and entertained, said Jerry Brown, director of PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ Canadian Entertainment and Media Advisory Practice. “We expect Virgin will have a classic opportunity to attract the MTV crowd.”

2.
With the trend to more hand-held devices for gaming, entertainment (iPod, Microsoft’s Zune) and navigation (TomTom, Mio), there’s also a continuing convergence of those functions into a single device. It has long been rumoured that Apple will hit the cellphone market with a product called the iPhone. “The question, though,” said Eddie Chan, guru of all things converged at IDC Canada, “is how much performance are you willing to compromise on, and how much are you willing to cannibalize the market for your own single-feature devices? Manufacturers would rather we bought multiple devices.” Still, the smartphone’s functional flexibility opens new doors beyond entertainment, e-mail and texting. For example, the addition of GPS—soon to be a standard feature in even mid-level mobiles—not only opens the door for voice-guided navigation on phones, it is also the starting gun for a new layer of business services. Take Buddy Beacon, which allows groups to see where their friends are at a glance. Other location-based services are set t o offer guided tours, custom mapping and coupons delivered to users in the vicinity to entice them to visit a store and spend. “By the end of 2007, I think GPS will really start to take off,” Chan said. Hirsh thinks 2007 will see mobile phones start to be used as wallets for transactions. He pointed again to Asia, where mobiles can transact with vending machines. “It will really open up things up.” And he thinks Voice over IP will start to find more take up among Wi-Fi users as city cores become wireless hotspots. With smartphones adding Wi-Fi to their standard configuration, users have more options to switch away from their carrier’s network to a cheaper option for e-mail, surfing and VoIP calls.

3.
Currently confined to a younger demographic where privacy isn’t as much of an issue, social networking—which includes blogging, forums and sharing personal information— could be ready to break out to a wider audience. “I didn’t think Joe and Jane average were ready for social media until I saw a Web 2.0 wine site,” said Hirsh, adding he thinks the overall social media demographic will skew older in 2007. There could also be interesting business applications. While some companies are already creating controlled social groups to test concepts and improve existing products or create buzz, harnessing the power of a social network within a company may be the next logical step. Intranet pages detailing current projects or problems requiring solutions may facilitate better sharing of resources much more quickly, especially when employees are spread out over several countries and time zones. “It could happen,” said Mike Dover, vice-president of syndicated research at New Paradigm in Toronto. “Certainly as the ’net generation moves into the workforce, they’re going to expect that. And we saw how LinkedIn, which was a similar social Web, moved to an older demographic.”

4.
Up until now, the relationship of old media to new media has been played as an adversarial match up, with the Internet gaining ground over traditional media in terms of advertising revenue, said David Jacobson, director of technology at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC). “But the recent announcement that Google will sell ads into newspapers and other services like Spotrunner— whose Web sites allow small businesses to purchase air time at just above bulk rates on television stations in any U.S. market and assemble ads with stock media.

5.
Traditional broadcasting remains threatened by the myriad homegrown content creators and the trend toward IP TV (television over the Internet), as creators post to sites like YouTube and consumers shift away from programming produced by the big networks. PWC sees it as part of a trend toward what it calls Ubiquitous Participation and said it will permeate media and entertainment for the foreseeable future. Fighting back, Brown said Bell ExpressVu is expected to launch an upgraded format of its Interactive TV with Microsoft next spring. Bell launched its initial version in November in time for the holiday season, but the next iteration is expected to be more fully featured. “EW Scripps (a media company with cable, newspaper and television properties) is successfully integrating programming on, say, The Food Channel or Home & Garden Television with product placement paid for by sponsors,” Jacobson said. “Viewers can pause the show, click on a couch, find out how to buy it from Scripp’s Shopzilla site and have it delivered.”

6.
NAND-Flash drives—better known as the ubiquitous USB key drives and Compact Flash cards in digital cameras— will begin eclipsing traditional hard drives starting in 2007. Fujitsu said it will ship PCs with 16GB NAND-flash drives instead of standard hard drives. These will cost more, and that will deter many buyers, but prices will drop and these systems may be more reliable than their predecessors, said IDC’s Chan. NAND-drives are expected to hit 32GB by 2008, a capacity sufficient to replace hard drives on PCs. NAND-drives are also compliant with the new Euru RoHS regulations, which limit the toxins permitted in electronics. They also require less power since there are no drive platters to spin up to speed. It also means iPods and other players like the new Microsoft Zune may soon come with NAND-drives instead of the current hard drives. Further propelling NAND is the fact that Microsoft’s Vista operating system can use such hybrid drives to cache start-up files for faster boot up, said Chan, adding he expects Vista’s release to be one of the dominant stories of the year.