Voice Over IP

The big surprise here was the acquisition game. When I made the predictions last year, i thought that the acquirers would be larger telcos. However, companies like Ebay and Yahoo! have been playing the acquisition game, looking at telecom space as a feature to add to their product set.

It does, however, show the rise of European players in the US telecom market. Skype was clearly a European player that was seen as a major player in the US market, which explains the acquisition by Ebay.

Asterisk also experienced a banner year with deployments increasing in the small and medium enterprise market. It has not yet broken into the large scale enterprise market so I get only half points for this prediction.

Entertainment Convergence

The convergence I predicted in the post is now in full swing. the introduction of the Xbox 360 as a convergence device and the rise of the video iPod as a way to move television into the arena of small consumer electronics has turbocharged the space.

While MP3 has not yet become the standard for mobile phone, it is starting to emerge. The disastrous release of the Motorola ROCKR has probably slowed progress in that area but I still content that it will happen in the future. Pass on this one.

Meanwhile, the prediction that the movie industry would start suing is starting to come true. They’ve started with a campaign trying to convince people of the evils of illegal downloading. However, the MPAA seems to have learned, to some extent, about the disastrous effect of suing one’s customers and is being careful to not follow in the footsteps of the RIAA.

Also as predicted, legal downloading of television shows is happening. It came from an unexpected source in the form of Apple, which is now taking the formula it applied to music into the rest of the space.

The decision by both XM and Sirius to offer a combined solution that includes both Internet streams and satellite feeds in the same package is following my prediction that radio is about to be upended.

The rise of user-created content is also one of the big stories of 2005 and I believe it will continue through 2006. While no star has broken out of the podcasting and videocasting world, I believe we’re on the cusp of seeing this happen. On the video end, I believe rocketboom will be the first star to break out. Their recent announcement of a partnership with Tivo is just the beginning. On the podcast end, the space is getting more complicated: the entry of the mainstream players into the market could act as a buffer, keeping new players away or at least protecting the status quo.

Business

Large mergers did indeed take the forefront in the 2005 year, however none of the mergers I predicted actually happened. A lot of money went into merger and acquisition budgets and has increased greatly in 2005.

Also impressive is the fact that many of the smaller players were the target of acquisition. It seems the new exit scenario for web 2.0 companies is not to go the IPO route but to find a larger company that will gobble you up.

Apple

This one is way off. Most of my predictions were off base: Apple did introduce a video player, to critical and consumer acclaim, and an iWork product suite, but they did not introduce any photo camera, a recording player, or a way to send images straight to printers. Their partnership with a phone company (Motorola and the ROKR) was fairly disastrous, showing the company still prefers going at it alone than trying to partner up.

Development

Service oriented architectures, trust and security did take to the forefront this year. Meanwhile weblogs and content management systems have not merged yet. However, more and more large companies are starting to take a look at weblog software, with RSS become a major distribution channel. This trend will continue to accelerate into the new year.

Personal

On the personal front, I made a commitment to blog more often. While it looks like this commitment will not come true (I didn’t create more entries), it comes with a substantial disclaimer. This year, I tried to focus on longer, more analytical types of pieces. My decision of doing it that way was largely due to a decision to try to add to the overall discussion instead of rehashing what other people have been saying. The interesting thing is that this approach has actually resulted in more readership. You don’t have to blog a lot to get people to read you; you just have to craft quality blog entries.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 2005 Predictions: Keeping the Score. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Voice Over IP

VoIP experienced tremendous growth in 2004 but it was just the beginning. This year, much more will happen in that space.

Cable providers will start deploying VoIP services on their networks and phone companies will start bundling VoIP services with their DSL offering as a way to compete. By year end, all major broadband providers, whether they are offering services over cable or DSL lines, will have a VoIP service bundled with their access service.

Unable to compete with the larger telcos, some smaller players in the market will merge on order to lower their cost per subscriber by bringing their infrastructures together. Also, independent VoIP companies will sign peering agreement with each other in order to bypass traditional telcos and lower the cost of connectivity from one independent VoIP company to another.

Further pressure will be put on all players on the American market as overseas companies will start targeting U.S. customers. Before year-end, at least one company will offer an unlimited calling to several countries plan. Other plans will provide unlimited calling to each continent. This will start putting pressure on established government monopolies in several countries, especially in Europe.

VoIP will also experience strong growth within the enterprise, with companies looking to open-source solutions like Asterisk to replace their PBX infrastructure with a lower cost alternative.

As all this happens, equipment will not only become cheaper but will also become much easier to use and install. Along with it, new sets will come out, with cordless VoIP offerings becoming much more common. Competition in this space will be on features available in new handsets.

With substantial portions of the phone network switching to VoIP, video telephony will start taking hold. However, the price of equipment will still be too high for those services to experience the kind of growth other sectors in the VoIP market will experience.

Entertainment Convergence

The convergence of the computer and other entertainment forms (television, radio, gaming, mobile phones) will continue, further blurring the lines in the convergence world.

With broadband now being the major way to access the Internet in the United States, Internet usage for new forms of entertainment will grow. Along with it, however, will be a continuing challenge to the established media order.

The challenges faced by the music industry with the introduction of Napster will now be the new reality for the movie and television industry. Five years ago, I started seeing the phenomenon emerge and believe the four step process of the digital asset dance will be full blown for the MPAA this year. The MPAA will spend part of the year suing companies and users for downloading movies. However, they are also better prepared that the music industry in that they are already offering legal download services like MovieLink.

While litigation will be one of the ways convergence appears on the front page, many providers will find a way to mine this new world for new dollars. Expect some companies to start offering legal download of television programs for a fee. As the Internet becomes the standard telecommunication infrastructure, content will start getting carried more heavily. Phone companies will start using this to offer bundle TV services with their DSL offering as a way to compete with the cable TV companies that have invaded the telecom turf. Before year end, at least one traditional telco will offer TV over IP. All that content will be protected by DRM systems, getting people more and more used to having less and less rights over the content they receive.

Meanwhile, on the wireless end, the introduction of more powerful mobile phones and the introduction of faster mobile phone networks will also play out in the favor of content producers. As voice traffic revenues continue to decrease, expect mobile phone companies to push data services such as downloadable movies and downloadable music more heavily. By year, MP3 will be the standard format for cellphones and Apple will offer a mobile phone version of the iTunes music store, allowing users to download music from the store and customize their phone with the latest hits.

On the non-Internet end of things, video on demand will continue the strong growth it experienced in 2004 and more programming will be offered in HDTV format, prompting an increase in sales of televisions and tuners that can receive those signals. Meanwhile, radio will follow the path taken by cable television in the early 80s. As satellite radio takes hold as the new “edgier” alternative to traditional radio, people will get more used to the idea of paying for radio. However, they will also require that those services be offered over the Internet as well as over the proprietary networks like XM and Sirius.

But not all content will be coming from big corporations. The grassroots will also play a key role in the distribution of online media in 2005. While podcasting has been the domain of a few geeks in 2004, easier to use tool will bring the phenomenon to the forefront and expect more audio services to be available from regular users. Following on the tail of this phenomenon will be an increase in videocasting from individuals. Much of it will be disappointing but a few gems will emerge, creating new stars who will emerge from the Internet and move on to more traditional media, based on the fame of their online offerings.

Business

Mergers and acquisitions will dominate the software world this year, as more companies realize that the only way into the enterprise is through a complete set of offerings. Expect several multi-billion dollar mergers and/or acquisition. In my mind, McAfee will be acquired or merge with either Symantec or CA; SAP will be acquired by Microsoft; Business Objects will be acquired by Oracle. As holds true for such precise predictions, none of this will actually happen the way I predicted it.

In late 2004, IBM left the personal computer business, selling its unit to Lenovo, a Chinese manufacturer. Expect the same to happen to at least one other PC vendor this year as the margins on personal computers continue to decrease, turning them into commodities.

Apple

Apple, which to date has resisted the price pressures other computer manufacturers have experienced, will introduce a cheaper version of their Macintosh. This, however, will not stem the continuing loss of market share they are experiencing. As Linux continues to grow, the Apple story in the computer business becomes more and more difficult and the company will increasingly rely on the consumer device business as its savior, building a new economy around the success of the iPod and iTunes music store.

The company will not, however, release a video player this year. Among some of the new features I would envision coming from Apple are:

• A flash-based iPod, which will be even smaller than the iPod mini and will be in the $100-$150 price range
• A partnership with a phone company to create a phone that will be able to download music from a special version of the iTunes music store and play MP3 ringtones
• An iPod with audio recording built-in
• A portable camera with iPod-like features
• A new way to send pictures from the iPod directly to printer via Airport express

While it focuses on the music business, Apple will not spend much time updating its laptop business. Adoption will drop in that part of the business as PC vendors start selling sub-$500 laptop PCs, making the iBook look expensive by comparison. Apple will try to enter the low cost market but not with a laptop: they will introduce a mac without monitor for under $500, offering integration with the iPod, and plugs to attach the computer to a television as its major features.

On the software end, the company will introduce a Word Processor and Spreadsheet program. They will release them, along with Keynote, as a complete package named iWork which will be aimed at students and small businesses. The package will be available for free on new computers.

Development

Blogs and RSS will continue their growth and will move strongly within the enterprise space. Adoption of RSS will continue its explosive growth but crest in 2005 as users start trying to find ways to cope with the information overload. New components in RSS readers will attempt to help organize RSS feeds but those basic efforts will initially fail and discussions will be set towards the end of the year as to the effective way to organize large amounts of data.

Weblogs and content management systems will start covering some of the same ground and enterprise will start using weblogs internally at the departmental level. Meanwhile, external employee weblogs will start becoming the focus of more litigations as corporation try to retain their intellectual property and fight the kind of transparency that comes from having employees talk openly on the web. Internal rules and regulations will be set in how employees can use blogs.

Meanwhile, in the development world, Service Oriented Architectures will continue being the approach to delivering next generation services. SOA will grow largely internally but some companies will start exposing some web services via XML to their partners. A new set of interesting new applications will come out as a result of those exposures.

Security and trust will continue to be big subjects and I suspect that trust will become an even bigger one with new standards emerging around the concept but no general agreement as to the best implementation.

Open source software will continue its strong growth, getting into more and more specialized fields. With the delays in delivery of Microsoft’s next operating system, Linux will continue to grow but complaints about price will start to arise. While the open source movement has offered free software, there will continue to be an increase in the price of supported version of the software.

Personal

I’ll promise to update the blog more often, will do OK for a little while and will then fall back into my regular pattern of a couple of updates a week. Or not… Either way, only the new year will tell.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 2005 Predictions. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

An example of this is the weblog. While the more web-savvy participants amongst us are very familiar with the concept, there seems to be a lack of understanding of what blogs are about. Most dismiss them as diaries (which some blogs, like those hosted by LiveJournal, truly are) but fail to realize that there is a lot more going on in the space.

I recently had a chance to discuss emerging trends in technology with a number of Internet executives for large companies and was very surprised to see how quickly the weblog phenomenon is being dismissed. What I suspect is that this is largely the result of the complexity of weblogland, an area that is hard to really classify neatly in a few buzzwords. A world where Glenn Reynolds sits only a few clicks away from Mark Pilgrim or Alan Reiter is one that reflects only the diversity of opinions you can find in the web space, and the variety of subjects that are covered.

I suspect that what we are witnessing is a very quiet revolution in content publishing. For starters, most mainstream B2B publications are starting to loose ground to the web. The reason behind this is that information is more widely available in the only world, and at a much faster rate than in the print world. Furthermore, the costs related to printing and shipping weekly publications are much higher than those of setting up websites, even considering the high price of full content management solutions.

Meanwhile, individuals with particular knowledge of a field can set themselves up online for a relatively small amount of money and start producing content almost instantly. What is needed after that is some amount of personal marketing, which in itself is becoming much easier with the rise of social network sites like Ryze and LinkedIn. The next step in this new format for online publishing will be a revenue model. Some people have already tried taking donation and, increasingly, companies like Google are starting to aggregate advertising across networks of blogs. I suspect that, within the next five years, we probably will start seeing blogs appear as a new form of micro-publishing.

But what about the editors?

Of course, the discussion of weblogs as journalism inevitably leads to a discussion of the role of editors within the journalism field as a whole. However, the interesting thing happening in blogland is that the editing is actually distributed. To a large extend, services like Blogdex Daypop, and Popdex are starting to serve as basic editors in terms of automating the information on what story is seen as important across the web world. This level of automation is similar, in a way to that used by Google News and fills an important part of the editor’s job: setting the agenda. By aggregating data across blogland, those services use “blog populi” as their editor, essentially letting the aggregation of links set the basic agenda. What is important to a lot of blogger must be an important story and therefore deserves front page treatment.

The next role for the editor is in establishing whether facts are correct or wrong. This is largely done through a level of checks and balances in the blog world that can rival that of the best news organization. A story that is considered important by “blog populi” will get a lot of linkage and, using such technologies as trackback and comment system, will provide much in the way of corrections. As a result, discussions starting in one location can feed another, be criticized by a third one, and all and all present a fuller picture. However, a lot of system (including my own), do not offer trackback yet. Once all blogs do, this kind of fact checking could increase the overall value of the content. System like Technorati provide a good idea of what other people are saying about a particular entry. This, once again, goes to the fact checking nature of the editor’s role.

The Distribution Issue

The nature of online publishing is largely one of pull versus push. Few people actually receive news from web sites in the way they do from other media form. For example, I receive a newspaper every morning. This is what is called a push model. I subscribed to that newspaper and do not have to remember to go and buy it every day. However, in a pull model, I decide where to go to get my information. In a way, one could argue that broadcast falls under both categories: one decides what TV or radio station to pick up (pull) but once they did, the information is pushed to them. Similarly, one decides what address to type into the URL box on their browser. However, a small format called RSS allows to turn weblogs into push medium. Using a client called an RSS reader, one can subscribe to a weblog and, after that, receive abstracts from the weblogs on a regular basis. This model allows blog publishers to end up with more regular subscribers, and is key to the weblog world because these reminders do not require any extra work on the part of the reader to gather the information. As a result, one can grow his/her readership. I’d recommend that every publisher reading this look into the format and consider implementing it. There are some tremendous income opportunities there, ranging from publishing of highlights with text-advertising attached to them to offering customized RSS feeds for an extra fee.

Journalism or not?

So, in the final analysis, some blogs are emerging as a new form of journalism, while others do fall squarely in the world of diary. As a result, they can be used as useful knowledge management tool and potentially micro-publishing platform.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Silent Revolution. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

I generally disagree with Anil’s contention that it’s not a great fit. I believe there are many areas in which Google and Pyra are complementary.

My personal suspicion is that Google is looking at sites like Daypop, Popdex, and Blogdex and realizing that those sites, relying on the power of tens of thousands of editors, are working as well if not better than the news search engine Google has created. By buying Pyra Labs, Google can enhance its PageRank algorithms with some level of human interaction.

Going beyond the basic advantage in the search area, Google also is gaining a good tool to add to the Google Box and allow it entry in the overall corporate content management world. Why would anyone buy a box if it has search software only? How about if it has a full intranet solution on it?

While the acquisition does offer some level of centralization, I doubt it’s the only reason Google is doing it.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Google goes blogging. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.