The BBC Technology news team has come up with a somewhat yawnsville list of predictions (sorry guys) for the new year. In short they predict WiMax being adopted in Europe, the continuing rise of VOIP, ‘Ultra-mobile’ PCs taking off (can’t we just call them small laptops?) and IPTV coming of age. The list is royally and expertly fisked by mobile expert Ewan Spence who points out that all the talk of the rise mobile data is still predicated on the mobile networks doing something creative. And we all know how how that usually turns out. As Spence says: “I strongly suspect we’ll be sitting at the end of 2008 going, so where was WiMax beyond Milton Keynes?”. Meanwhile the BBC’s prediction about Ultra mobile PCs misses the point that “anything innovative that’s going to happen here is going to be in the user interface rather than in hardware.” And IPTV is going to be pointless when “the Freeview signal in the UK provides a perfectly serviceable MPEG-2 stream in the air”. Slam, dunk, as they say.
Somewhat better is the new BBC Technology blog which stealth-launched at the end of last year and now has a stunning two posts in the last two days. The best post so far has been from Rory Cellan-Jones who predicts the launch of Apple’s “iHome”, the death of Facebook through sheer boredom and the purchase of Marks & Spencer by Google. Now that’s more like it.