Spotlight: iOpening's Predictions for 2008

As the New Year comes in our attention turns to what will happen in the next 12 months, the iOpening team have sat down and had some discussion, looked at what everyone else has had to say, and have come up with the following predictions:

Messaging

Now, most people in their personal lives use some form of messaging on their PC or MAC. iOpening believe that 2008 will see a switch to businesses as the must have application, connecting businesses to businesses. There are a number of major companies betting the house on this for the future and we agree this will happen. It will become as common as email is today, and as we don't believe that it will all happen in 2008, it will however, be remembered as the year it all started.

Portable PC's

Recently, there has been a trend by the laptop manufactures to drive ever bigger machines to cater for the desire for big screens, whilst this is ok, it comes at a price, with the portability of these devices being compromised. iOpening, therefore, believe you will see the re-emergence of the small laptop device in 2008, which is deemed to be hailed as the “ultra portable”. Sure the mobile phone and PDA have tried to fill this gap to not much avail, they are close but not there yet.

Faster Internet Speeds

The average speed that most people receive to their house is around the 4 Mbps (Megabits Per Second), which is far short of what the broadband providers are touting. iOpening predict 2008 as the year when faster published speeds hit the streets, (and actually reach their targets!). There are already a couple of providers offering 20 and 24 Mbps to the house and as ADSL 2 rolls out and the speeds are turned up, you will see the average speed to the house more than double.

TV on Demand

This is nothing new from a technology perspective, and most if not all of the TV providers offer some form of TV on demand (TVOD) service. However, 2008 will see an increase in people watching TV programmes whatever and whenever they wish to. At first this will be driven by the wider adoption of Personal Video Recorders (PVR) devices followed by a switch to downloading the programmes on demand.

PC speed

If you look at what has been happening for the last 3 to 4 years, PC speeds have remained relatively static. In fact, we would only go as far as saying the core speed has just about doubled in the last 4 years. 2008 will be something of a step change to this trend. Intel have released their quad core processor and a refined version is due to be released within the next couple of months. AMD is not far behind with their tri-core processor. iOpening sees that by the end of the year, they will have produced a 8 core processor and as a stretch, you might even see the 16 core processor, the speed at which they all run, will be at just over the 4 GHz (Gigahertz) range.

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