The Obligatory 2007 Predictions Post

It's New Years Day and there should be better things to do, but Mashable tagged me when publishing his 2007 predictions, and so I thought I'd brain dump my generalised no specific trends slash market telepathy meets ironic turns of phrase post. Then Move on. Obviously I don't want to make it too bluefreeway or too specific, so if anything actualizes I can claim it.

The themes are obvious but also self-selecting to your own skillset/competence/angle. Google Leadership (Defend/extend search leadership by owning meta-search verticals; To attack TV advertising budgets thru GooTube; Offer freemium small business spend on Microsoft software and essential utilities such as CRM), Web 2.0 Consolidation (shutdowns, rollups, followon rounds for winners, IPO's), Video/Social Media Monetisation (pre-rolls, TVC teasers online, MySpace content integration sponsorships) and Enterprise aka B2B 3.0. (ASP 2.0 : Jotspot on muscle specific steroids.)

Disclosure : This does not constitute investment advice and given the speed by which YouTube created value (and it may well evaporate as quickly once copyrighted material is removed, although I do think the comprehensiveness of their index, community and mashups means it isn't a Napster like blow for them, esp as they have studios and brands using them as a marketing channel, it's just YouTube is now part of the establishment, in a good way) : Anyway, these trends are no different to my brother picking horses every Saturday.

10 TRENDS TO BE INDEXED, AGGREGATED AND FILTERED FOR 2007 BY THE ECHO-CHAMBER.

1. Enterprise 2.0 will get eaten by google. Writely, Jotspot and consumer/sme apps Docs, Calendar, Spreadsheets, Notes were just the start. Google will go from small productivity apps to medium sized - Watch out Salesforce and other webbased enterprise CRM. Nick Carr had a good riff here. Good news for those Enterprise 2.0 mash-up collaborative apps pushed by Early Stage VC that sounded kooky 12 months ago, but make more sense every day. Hello not to Microsoft's Fiji and Vienna.

2. Exploding Web TV pushes copyrighted content underground. Hopefully Bit Torrent made newbie easy with automagic RSS subscription will make up for lack of free Pro video content on the portals. Suffice to say there will be at least 2 acquisitions in the sub $50m space for pre or early stage revenue companies in the adsense for video advertising algorithm space. (more if they have a widget and are making videocasters money) Oh and google will buy spotrunner so it can bundle offline TV buying.

3. Dave Winer Will Keep Blogging. Come on, the chance of Dave stopping blogging is as likely as Mike Arrington spending 2 months at his parents and not krunchn, or the google aftermarket collapsing. (let's hope that adsense cashflow keeps working, ok disregard what I said about google there - we've all seen multiples and valuations collapse before so I'm not going to taint the well - Henry Blodget is confident, so am I, I think :) Also, if Dave doesn't blog, how are we going to get our lasagna tips ?

4. Search is a flat market for Google. The irony being now more than ever it needs to reinvest in search : And 2007, arms race and all, is the one year when a new simple web search tool might arise that gets us excited. It's name won't end with 'ia tho. Suffice to say vertical search players in classifieds (vast), travel (kayak, mob'mo), jobs (indeed, s-hired, jbstr), video/image (pixsy), shopping, real estate (zillow) and so on, will continue to prosper.com + zopa.com too while I'm here, which isn't really search, but Ebay should buy one of these "Ebay for lending" companies like Flickr should have done a YouTube of Flickr, before YouTube did a flickr of video and sold for $1.6B vs $35M.

5. Widget Foreplays are Bought by The Wily Ol' Fox Interactive. Stating the obvious but the best of MySpace plugins, will be banned and bought. Mashable will have covered them, and there will be an expensive conference in which the companies bought will be present. (there will be an increasing schism between conference and unconferences; suits and geeks etc. Robert Scoble will work for the governator, but PodTech will be drawn into some type of conflict...)

6. Apple's Reverse Psychology will come Full Circle in 2007. Apple haven't released a kewl product in almost 2 years (well the macbook was kewl till it became shutdown/heat/repair hell) - since I bought my first generation Imac 20" and Shuffle. (ok I really want the 24" already) That's because they've been working on all this interactive TV and mobile O/S stuff which isn't web 2.0/open source ship early and often. If we thought we'd bought too many MacBook Blacks and 17" Pros with Random Shutdown Syndrome (come on : time for a redesign already : MacBookPros look soo boring - it's a powerbook g4 looking laptop already) - All that aside, for Apple gluttons, and newbies like me, 2007 will be a year of crazy new products. Not saying I believe there will be a 50" iMac, or that the iPhone will rock helio but I can dream and I'm not buying anything fruity till I hear what Steve says at his next keynote. (he needs to make up for his last few boring addresses and the $84M options thing) There will be alot more Chumpy type things too.

7. Private Equity Distressed Rollups and Premium IPO's Hit. Facebook is not worth $8B and will be sold for less than YouTube, but it won't get much more than Linkedin. Companies will prepare bankers to do pseudo-IPO's, pay a few mill to start the process, then flip to Yahoo.

8. International gets big. Disclosure I dont live in the United States. Google will make almost half their revenue in 2007 from non US markets. Wendy Deng joined her first board which wasnt a TV station or newspaper, but instead - MySpace China. (and btw will Malone reinvent DirecTV as a newscorp offline triple or quad play killa ?) Russia, India, China, Europe, Australia for the lifestyle, kangaroos, and irony. The market I love next which I'll be spending time in for 2007 is the UK - All those big newspapers and a multi-billion pound paid search market, and low localised web 2.0 offers ! (even if my last visit there I couldn't have been worse) It's a different world out here ppls and local matters when it comes to most commerce, content and community :)

9. Wireless blog/vod/podcasting continues to rock. Nokia and Apple battle it out. Twitter becomes many times bigger than odeo. Soon phone calls will become audio podcasts. Auto-uploaded photos with account holder approval on material to become standard. Lots of little glue sync'g companies with specific purposes will do well here. Being able to real time blog, photo/video-upload and share media is going to be kick-ass for consumers as the major players from industries are not going to want to give up their marketshare.

10. Newspapers start providing moderated blogs. Disclosure I'm increasingly involved in helping publishers created structured user generated content communities. Copyright and defamation loom large (esp outside US) and pre-algorithmic and people moderation will become increasingly normal and some smart coders will figure out how The Guardian and even MySpace dont need to employ (as many) teams of people to moderate weird ass potentially legally damaging content. (and making the lawyers happy) Every newspaper that adopts RSS and provides blogs to their readers to participate in the news of the day is a good and simple thing if you ask me !

Addendum 1 : But if Duncan Riley is right and indie blog growth is flat at a strategy level anyway, mainstream blog growth will come from established media + mastheads - Major newspapers need to move on from being stuck in "blog comments" and give their readers their own blog, and then aggregate and filter everyone's postings. Same comments apply to podcasting I increasingly outside my TPN + K+TG podcast favourites listen to local morning pro's podcasts not niche)

Addendum 2 : At the MSM-Blogs macro-level (The New Publishing World of Amateurs and Pros Working Together) enablers like automattic will continue to do well as no one got fired for buying the IBM of blogging. Newspapers are far from dead, as private equity knows. What is the real difference/arbitrage between newspapers (or TV stations) having high value face to face advertising relationships and google having low value self-service internet advertising ones anyway ? :) Yes, it's the growth rate I know but expect more advertising rollups which combine on and offline revenues and aim to get a blended multiple much higher than the print/offline one, esp on the interactive agency side. (already happened here with the emitch merger)

Oh and I almost forgot : Web 3.0" - or the Implicit Web as Fred is calling it. Or to be more MIT friendly, the "Dynamics of Information", "Intelligence Amplification" or "TAR" - to use 3 Feld'isms I like. (which Brad wrote about over 1 year ago which I guess is why he's the ultra-success 50 marathons in 50 states by 50 years dude - like (some watch) Buffett sometimes u just watch the playaz as well as the trendz and the companies:)

So what is Web 3.0 (mock sardonic grin etc but given this is semantic web who cares about semantics - it's just names for perceptions of new market iterations that create customer, technical and financial opportunity and a way to explain to external'folk) : Basically when one of your BFF's or acquaintances changes a job and you get an email from Linkedin saying "Profile Changes of Your Contacts" - there will be awhole lot of activity from Big Brother startups monitoring, mining, aggregating and comparing your every click with everyone else in this social media cosmos. And you will let them, until you don't receive enough valued insight or recommendations back. Fun, until it hurts.