Media Predicts 2008 | bub.blicio.us

words and pictures by Brian Solis

It’s that time of year again when traditional and new media experts take the stage to predict the hottest trends, companies, and products for the year ahead.

In Silicon Valley, the annual PRSA Media Predicts event took place at The Computer History Museum and featured a panel of top tech media discussing the year in review as well as the trends and technologies to watch.

Sam Whitmore

The panel featured:

Kara Swisher, Boomtown, AllThingsD

Rob Hoff, BusinessWeek

Jim Goldman, CNBC

Jon Swartz, USAToday

Don Clark, Wall Street Journal

Robert Scobleizer Scoble

Victoria Murphy Barret, Forbes

Moderated by Ann Winblad

MC, Sam Whitmore

Here are the highlights:

Don: VMWare was interesting in 2007, therefore virtualization will make its way into the consumer market in 2008.

Rob: I’m looking to Google for where to look in 2008.

Kara: What happens to large portals in 2008? How is Yahoo going to get off its sorry ass?

Robert: The biggest battles will be between Google and everyone.

Jim: Oracle is going to be a fascinating play to watch in 2008, so is Microsoft.

Kara Swisher and Don Clark

Amy: There’s going to be a recession and the new ridiculous dotcoms will vanish, making it the biggest story of 2008.

Jim: I don’t think you can under estimate Vista. Verizon and mobile will be huge next year.

Victoria: Mobile will drive Silicon Valley.

Someone: Boring is back.

Kara: Walt Mossberg wrote a story called “Free my phone” and he’s absolutely right.

Jim Goldman and Rob Hoff

Robert: Amazon S3 is hosting everything and its infrastructure play will be interesting in 2008.

Jim: Amazon is overpriced and it worries me.

Kara: Web 2.0 companies, especially the widget companies, that are dependent on advertising, can’t continue.

Victoria: Everyone’s an ad company and that’s a mistake. The trend will focus on targeted advertising.

Rob: The Valley is driven a lot by advertising and I think that if a recession comes, it could be a big problem for all ad supported businesses including mine.

Robert: How many people can make money in advertising?

Kara: People spend 20% of their time online, yet only 7% of ad budgets are targeted there.

Don: You can’t pass over HP. Enterprise will continue to grow while consumer subsides.

Kara: Thank god that these guys aren’t going IPO. Thank goodness they’re not dropping their sorryness on us!

Don: I’m skeptical about our ability to save the world.

Jim: I look at what makes The Valley cool, and it’s about innovation.

Kara: Traditional media is dead – it’s about the 2-5 years olds right now and how they will live their life. Online presence, everyone will have it in the future. It’s not about looking up friends. It how you live…what you buy, etc.

Jim: HD DVD vs. Blueray is a non-story. It won’t matter in three years when we’re all downloading our content.

Robert: Home entertainment. Bought a mac mini and hooked it up to my 60-inch HDTV. It’s all about downloading movies and sharing with friends from the living room right now.

Don: The recession is looming, but if the US stops buying, let’s not forget that the the majority of companies in the U.S. right now are enjoying sales with as much as 70% overseas.

Robert: Live video, particular video from cellphones, will be big next year.

Jim: Yahoo gets acquired or takes a significant investment from Dubai. Microsoft will release XBox Mobile.

Victoria: Next year will be the year of acquisitions and consolidations. Something will happen to Yahoo and maybe with BEA.

Rob: If the credit crunch worsens, there will be a lot more companies in the TechCrunch dead pool. By the end of the year, Web 3.0 will be here.

Kara: Webkins and Club Penguin represent interesting online trends. Because it’s an election year, politics will play into things such as privacy. There will be a tiring amount of grandstanding. Hollywood will continue to make mistakes and loose market share and audience. They need to get with it.

Don: Open source is talked about as freedom and liberty, but when we talk about open, such as in APIs, we’re talking about free beer.

Don: Green tech and clean energy will be a big story.
Everyone: Agreed.

Well, that’s about as much as I could get. I was typing so fast that the keyboard started to smoke and everyone at me table told me that if I wanted to smoke, I needed to go outside.

All in all, the panel discussion was fun and somewhat insightful, but nothing we haven’t already read in techmeme. Each person up there was incredibly witty, funny, and beyond gifted with the ability to see through the hype, BS, while still retaining the ability to see what could and should succeed.

We’re about to get bombarded by this stuff over the next month as the year comes to an end and writers go to their files to write the annual wrapups and obligatory predictions that noone ever goes back to grade them on.

Honestly, I would love to see these panels at every event I attend from CES to DEMO to TechCrunch40 and everything in between. As a PRSA event, I feel that the topic would be better suited to how the world of communications is shifting and how you can keep up without falling too far behind, especially in these times. The last 15 minutes seemed to resonate the most with the audience as people talked about how they prefer to be contacted.

Scobleizer shows us his Amazon Kindle