I spent a lot of time in 2005 encouraging friends in the affiliate community to build apple widgets and get into the widget space in general. With Vista coming and live gadgets being a large part of that, with sideshow and other widget type "easy program desktop apps" I honestly believe that 2006 is the year to position yourself for entering into the "I have a small snippet of code... add it to your dekstop/website, get a great user experience and earn me $$$".
Looking around I see a hell of a lot of people entering this area, with postapp, typepad widgets, the plethora of live gadgets and apple widgets and even big companies entering the space, for example the yahoo finance widget. Widgets rock, widgets can make money, widgets can be link bait and guess what those clever folks out there playing around with the web have worked it out and are moving into the space heavily. If you aren't already moving rapidly you will need a really good idea to beat those first and (in particular) second movers who have had some time to think about what they are doing in this space. These guys will make the new big money in 2007 but a few guys will start making big money on something else before everyone else spots it... So for me the challenge of what's next springs to mind again.
Well I will stick my neck out and suggest we are about to enter an era of back to the future and in 2007 push technologies will make a resurgance. "Oh don't be soooo 1999!" I hear you all shout but no... wait and think about it. VOIP is growing like crazy and instant messengers have never been larger. Mobile commerce has taken off in Japan and in JP and EU the mobile phone companies are raking it in with text messages (now I have a blackberry the idea of paying 10c a text message seems crazy!). I see a lot of convergence in this field though as large WIFI networks take off and blackberry/treo etc... get integrated into more consumer (rather than business) mobile phone style products. More products like sony mylo will launch and you will soon be reachable almost anywhere for free (or a slightly more expensive mobile contract) by instant messenger in the large cities. This will open up millions of people used to text to more innovative text services previously held up by a. the lack of easily sending texts from computer apps, b. the cost of text services and c. the lack of IM apis (which all the interoperability conversations should help). This discussion misses off the whole upside of IM on the desktop too.
So think about it... what can be done when you can alert anyone, anywhere to anything and how can you make money from that. In 2007 this will be a big new:old thing... I am sure of it!
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