Business 2.0 magazine assumes the role of predicting 2007′s hottest leaps. And here, you will find what they are about and how to commercialize on them (if available in some form!). As there are 15 of them, we will review them in multiple parts, so that the blog post won’t look like a boring annual booklet…

    • Space: Nations put even-more effort in this grey zone between real science and fiction, with hopes ranging from finding vast stockpiles of minerals and helium-3 to opening up moon resorts with earth-view. A very small decimal will be enough to state the chance of any commercial update will come in 2007, but we may see incredible amount of news coming about consumer-targeted space travel in the next 5 years. To commercialize? Snap up some material-suppliers of NASA that has international-distribution potential, which will likely to feed India and China.
    • 100$ Lap-top: Words are spread around for a very long time, for Negroponte’s 100$-a-laptop challenge. B2.0 says 2007 will be the year that developing nations will really start to see them on their laps. Latin America nations, Nigeria and Thailand. The non-profit “One laptop per child” project seems on track and details can be accessed from here. We do not have any commercial seeking from this project, and hope that the project grows bigger and to-be-techies from developing nations become a web-surfer in 2007.
    • Wireless-USB: Although not a leap from scratch, it is the most exciting item in B2.0′s list for me as it will supposedly freed me from the snaky cables of the Vaio mouse, Seagate External HDD, iPod and PSP mixing up with each other. The hypothetical transfer rate will be the same as USB2.0 (480Mbit/sec), with a range of 10 meters. Current certified partners seem enough to push the technology into our homes (HP, Intel, Microsoft, Philips, NEC, Samsung), so expect to see cordless HDDs in near future.
    • Independent World Television: “No corporate dollars, no government funding, no commericials, no strings”. It seems like the semantic translation of what we all think when we turn on the conventional TV to watch the news. IWT tries to turn “free-media” idea (as in Platon’s mind) into today’s world by contracting freelance reporters around the world on a pay-per-news basis, and form a one-hour TV session a day building on these collections. In addition, a website offering videos on a 24/7 basis will be available for subscribers. Disruptive Canadian Producer Paul Jay thinks 250.000 people paying $10 a month will be enough to cover all the expenses needed to run the new model. Will we pay it? Certainly for now, as it boldly encourages citizen journalism. Yet, one question needs to be answered: The moderation procedure that sieves out fake news will also be just in sieving politically and economically skewed news and reports as well? Or will we read and see what is on the moderators’ minds? Time will tell…