3.  Mergers and Acquisitions continues to grow

This is a high risk business, but thankfully investment and growth remain strong. It's an industry with many small players, many of whom appear more like features and functions, rather than companies with a sustaining value proposition.   It's also an industry still in test mode for business models, customer acquisition and operating systems.  That means many players big and small will falter, and others will be saved through M&A.  My advice is to put your egos aside and seek out some M&A activity, particularly amongst the emerging companies. 

4.  Local Search - someone will finally get it right

This year will see a really strong rise in demand for local search, and I believe some company, actually a collaboration of companies (likely a few small app developers, linked to a bigger provider) will finally get it right.  One of local searches biggest challenges is getting information from the local companies, and these local companies are micro businesses.  The problem has been the assumption that the micro businesses are tech savvy - well they aren't.  My local tailor, pizza guy, book store, and even theater don't have computers, so don't even think about them putting a website together that someone can link to and mobilize.  Someone please - make it easy for these businesses to provide their information first because without content, the technical prowess of the search application doesn't really matter.

5.  Finding the little "o"

The industry finally hit the wall on fragmentation last year, and I expect it to be a louder cry this year.  Open was the siren song late last year, and although Android has a long way to go, I applaud Google for putting itself out there with the Open Handset Alliance, to bring greater attention  to the issue of fragmentation.  Are we going to solve the problem this year - ya right.  I do think we will see significant effort by the big companies, individually and collectively, which will  tackle many smaller issues and make things a little more 'open' and easier for developers. 

"O" of course also stands for Open Source - expect to see several open source handsets hit the market this year.

6.  Other Wireless trends

In order to keep this thread to a minimum, other tech trends I've got my eye on for 2008 include:  mobile payments, NFC, sensors, and mobile video.

Let me know if you have any predictions to add or comments on these!

As the 2008 schedule heats up, WIP will be at the following this month, let me know if you would like to meet:

·          January 17 - Pacific Northwest Wireless Summit, hosted by WINBC in Vancouver, where we are heading up some panels.  Some fantastic speakers will be there including Fred Ghahramani of AIRG, Chetan Sharma, Bill Lee from ACCESS and many others.   Then there's the option of skiing in Whistler for the weekend or attending the 6^th Annual Ukrainian New Year's party - trust me a tough choice!

·          January 23/24 - Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Days Conference in Santa Clara at the Sun Campus, were I am speaking and participating.

·          January 29/30 - Demo 08 in Palm Desert - always a favorite with over 70 new products being launched.