Just how big has YouTube become? Well, in the three and a half (!) short years since it was introduced to the public, it has become a serious venue for political ads and a legitimate rival to television itself in the number of viewers it attracts (especially of the younger generation). Millions of people worldwide now dream of getting famous via YouTube videos, skipping the traditional Hollywood route altogether. (The site has even propelled one struggling young actress to a role in a major Hollywood film (more…)

Although written for a European audience, we found a recent CNBC Business Report entitled “Top Ten Tech Trends” very much applicable to the United States as well, if not for the whole modern world.

And that’s not just because it’s based in large part on American technology giants like Microsoft, Intel and Google. It’s also because Europe has shown itself adept at applying innovations on a large scale in a way that often wins enthusiastic response from the consumer and business markets.

CNBC’s Tony Glover is confident that several of the new innovations we’ve seen lately are just the beginning of larger trends that will revolutionize the telecom and IT industries over the next few years. Looking at some of the examples he sites, it’s hard to argue with his conclusions.

Best of all, he feels that these consumer tech breakthroughs will result in “unprecedented opportunities for small and medium-sized players” — great news for small business owners looking for new ways to compete with the big guys.

The basis for his review is the big 3GSM Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, the world’s largest exhibition for the mobile technology industry. The GSM is a worldwide mobile communications network that originated in Europe and is now used by over two billion people in 212 countries, according to the article.

Once again Bill Gates and Steve Jobs will be going toe-to-toe to decide who will dominate the next generation of computing. But the fact that the US computing industry’s major battleground in 2007 will be high-end wireless handhelds is testimony to the global success of the GSM network, the European Commission’s mobile communications standard. The number of people using GSM has mushroomed from around one million in 1993 to over two billion today, operating across 212 countries.

And the top ten trends are:

1. If there is one trend that will dominate in 2007, it is the globalisation of mobile communications. The mobile phone industry estimates that around 1.3 billion mobile phones will be sold in 2007, with the rapidly developing economies of India and China being the main engines for growth. Mobile operators in India, for example, are signing new mobile phone owners at the staggering rate of about a million a week. …

2. The second trend … is the way in which mobile communications are becoming more sophisticated and relying less on basic voice services. Mobile operator O2, owned by Spain’s Telefonica, predicts that all phones will be email-enabled by 2010. This will effectively leapfrog consumers in markets like India and China from the 19th to the 21st century. They will be able to move from being without a phone or PC straight to the world of always-connected email and internet services simply by signing up for a mobile phone. Way before this happens, devices such as Apple’s new iPhone will have introduced users to high-definition mobile audio and video. Electronic gaming, music and even TV programmes will become available to millions almost overnight. …

3. The third major trend … is the continued convergence of IT and telecoms. Not only will mobile phones behave increasingly like computers, but telecoms operators … will also use their broadband services to supply services such as internet TV (IPTV) to customers. … BT (British Telecom) has recently struck a string of deals with content providers including Universal Music and Time Warner in order to be able to provide an ever-wider choice of on-demand entertainment. …

4. The fourth trend will see the rise of increasingly sophisticated forms of internet-based advertising as IPTV takes off. Microsoft is now determined to take Google’s ball away and run with it. It has, for instance, developed its own form of Google-style paid-for search that uses Microsoft’s vast database of personal information to allow advertisers to target specific demographic groups.

“Advertisers can see the age and sex of web surfers clicking on their ads as a result of information gathered by Microsoft properties such as MSN Hotmail, which requires those registering to submit their age bracket and gender,” says James Colborn, product manager at Microsoft’s adCenter research labs. He adds that advertisers do not have access to the names of those visiting their sites, merely a demographic overview of their age and sex.

According to Colborn, the adCenter labs on the Microsoft campus outside Seattle are about to release even more precise online advertising tools. Microsoft is launching a trial IPTV advertising service with an as-yet-unnamed major US retailer that will make a technological prediction made by Bill Gates last year a reality. …

5. The fifth major trend [is] the way in which all consumer IT devices, mobile and fixed, will become content guzzlers. The competition to acquire quality content will become intense, but ironically, the very technology providing consumers with the ability to access such a wide range of content will also make it increasingly difficult for major content owners to derive any revenue from their products.

6. This is a result of the sixth trend, which will be the proliferation of free services. The early years of the internet trained users to expect internet-based services to be largely free, and this has become a well-established trend. It will benefit small and nimble players with low overheads offering the kind of services capable of generating advertising.

Traditional entertainment giants like the Hollywood film studios will become increasingly vulnerable. Having been weaned on free music download sites such as Kazaa, many younger consumers now see nothing inherently wrong in using file-swapping services based outside the US to download copyrighted film and TV content for free.

7. The seventh trend will be the growing familiarity of the letters DRM – short for digital rights management – as traditional content providers such as the major Hollywood studios fight tooth and nail to protect their investments. New US laws designed to give long prison sentences to movie pirates are just the start.

8. The eighth trend [is] mobile operators such as Vodafone finally starting to accept that consumers will never use their handsets to access high-priced data services in the way these companies anticipated when they started to build their 3G networks at an estimated cost of €200bn. Instead, these operators will turn to business customers. Companies like Vodafone are already seeing business revenues rise as corporate users install 3G cards on their laptops.

9. This move to increased business mobility will be accelerated by trend number nine, as new types of mobile device from companies like Intel bridge the gap between mobile phones and laptops. Ultra-mobile laptops are shrinking, as evidenced by OQO’s Vista handheld computer. The key element to this trend is that the computing industry will finally abandon its one-size-fits-all philosophy. This will offer new opportunities for small and nimble companies to deploy mobile workforces and save money on the cost of centralised offices.

According to Intel, this revolution in portable computing will not merely be a question of physical dimensions. Portable computers will also be manufactured for specific environments such as schools and hospitals.

10. The tenth trend will be an extension of this kind of dedicated computing as machine-to-machine wireless communication becomes increasingly important. Machines ranging from in-car computers to heart monitors and other medical devices will be able to communicate with one another. It is estimated that by 2011 there will be over 100 million wirelessly connected devices.

Check out the original article in its entirety here.

“Technologies want to survive, and they reinvent themselves to go on.” (Paul Saffo, technology forecaster in Silicon Valley.)

Technology expert Steve Lohr, writing in yesterday’s New York Times, shares a fascinating theory centered around the fact that, contrary to popular opinion of recent years, many of yesterday’s technologies aren’t dead yet; they’re alive, kicking, and often still turning a profit for their respective manufacturers.

To prove this theory, Lohr explores the state of the mainframe, I.B.M.’s classic contribution to technological hardware. The company released a new version of the mainframe last month; remarkable, given that the equipment was famously predicted to be put out of its misery by 1996. The author then uses this example to shed light on history’s other obsolete technologies that just never went away.

Today, mainframe sales are a tiny fraction of the personal computer market. But with the mainframe facing extinction, I.B.M. retooled the technology, cut prices and revamped its strategy. A result is that mainframe technology — hardware, software and services — remains a large and lucrative business for I.B.M., and mainframes are still the back-office engines behind the world’s financial markets and much of global commerce.

The mainframe stands as a telling case in the larger story of survivor technologies and markets. The demise of the old technology is confidently predicted, and indeed it may lose ground to the insurgent, as mainframes did to the personal computer. But the old technology or business often finds a sustainable, profitable life. Television, for example, was supposed to kill radio, and movies, for that matter. Cars, trucks and planes spelled the death of railways. A current death-knell forecast is that the Web will kill print media.

What are the common traits of survivor technologies? First, it seems, there is a core technology requirement: there must be some enduring advantage in the old technology that is not entirely supplanted by the new. But beyond that, it is the business decisions that matter most: investing to retool the traditional technology, adopting a new business model and nurturing a support network of loyal customers, industry partners and skilled workers.

The unfulfilled predictions of demise, experts say, tend to overestimate the importance of pure technical innovation and underestimate the role of business judgment. “The rise and fall of technologies is mainly about business and not technological determinism,” said Richard S. Tedlow, a business historian at the Harvard Business School.

To survive, technologies must evolve, much as animal species do in nature. Indeed, John Steele Gordon, a business historian and author, observes that there are striking similarities in the evolutionary process of markets and biological ecosystems. Dinosaurs, he notes, may be long gone, victims of a change in climate that better suited mammals. But smaller reptiles evolved and survived, and today there are more than 8,000 species of reptiles, mainly lizards and snakes, compared with about 5,400 species of mammals.

It’s a fascinating article; click here to read it in its entirety. And, as always, let us know your thoughts in the comments section.

The iPhone. Windows Vista. Google Android. 2007 was quite a year for consumer technology. And according to the Washington Post’s resident tech expert writer Rob Pegoraro, Apple came out as the clear winner by the year’s end” “often at the expense of Microsoft”, he wrote in today’s year-end consumer technology review:

Apple’s successful switch to Intel processors, which made it easy to run Windows alongside Mac OS X, gets much of the credit for the company’s new popularity. So does OS X itself ” a remarkably sane and simple way to run a computer — and the often-outstanding programs bundled on new Macs.

But Microsoft didn’t help itself, either.

Windows Vista’s steep system requirements made it unusable on many Windows PCs. Vista’s stringent anti-piracy routines alienated law-abiding customers. Its well-intended “User Account Control” security turned out to be a nuisance.

Many third-party software developers who had fueled Microsoft’s past success also sandbagged Vista. Some took months to revise their programs for the new system; some still haven’t finished the job.

Of course, no summary of Apple’s success in 2007 would be complete without mentioning the iPhone; and you can’t really bring up the iPhone without talking about the Google Android project (which has already had a successful level of support from phone carriers, even before being released):

Windows Vista also lost all hope of being the year’s biggest product debut when Apple introduced the iPhone. Its touch-sensitive screen, which lets you zoom into Web pages by spreading two fingers across the screen, brings the same frictionless simplicity to the mobile Web that the Nintendo Wii brought to video games.

The iPhone also showed what could happen if wireless carriers left phone design to people who were actually good at it. What if, say, the Web’s premier source of information could make a phone?

It just so happened that in November, Google announced its Android project and a lineup of phone manufacturers and wireless carriers that will work on it. When it ships the second half of next year (if all goes well), Android will let any user customize it at will.

Not long after that, one of the most controlling carriers ever, Verizon Wireless, announced that it would open its network to any compatible device — not just those customized to its specifications — in 2008.

Other carriers have joined in selling freedom as a feature. For example, AT&T now brags that customers can use any compatible phone on its network.

Mr. Pegoraro goes on to discuss the ongoing revolution in digital rights management (DRM), software “that controls what you can do with a song download”, and the role of (guess who!) Apple CEO Steve Jobs in urging broad changes in the current model of that software. Needless to say, with record labels nationwide in panic mode and online file sharing reaching all-time highs, any and all changes to DRM business models have huge reverberations to consumers and corporations nationwide.

Wal-Mart and then Amazon.com opened MP3-download stores, featuring more unrestricted downloads than iTunes. Apple responded by cutting prices and expanding the selection of its DRM-free offerings; Microsoft, in turn, added a million MP3s to its Zune store.

Some major record labels have resisted this change, but the market will not grant them much choice — their competitors sell a better product.

Summed up, the writer attributes these consumer tech initiatives to the hope that “parts of the tech industry are grasping the value of choice” a feature that might be more attractive to buyers than the usual faster-better-cheaper sales pitch.” We can only hope he’s right.

Read Rob Pegoraro’s original Washington Post article here.