Happy New Year to all of you that are regular readers of this blog and to those of you who might be coming to it the first time.  May 2008 be a happy year for everyone.  I can promise that it will be another year of upheaval and change, probably exceeding 2007 in that regard.  I will submit to you my annual predictions, both general and specific, for the year within the next two weeks.  Right now I would like to take a quick look at several late in the year developments of 2007 that provide indication as to where …

Google has now made the long awaited announcement that it would be entering the wireless arena.  It was not a product, or “Google Phone” roll-out, but rather the announcement of OHA, or the Open Handset Alliance.  OHA(my choice to come up with an acronym as the full name sounds a bit too bureaucratic and almost Orwellian for me to type it a lot) is the next step in the globalization of connectivity and something I have anticipated and expected for a couple of years.

On this blog, and at conferences I point to the fact that it is the cell phone …

In prior columns, here and here I have written about the transformative power of the cell phone.  Currently there are more than 2.1 billion cell phone accounts in the world and more than 220 million in the US.  More people have cell phones than have computers or use the Internet.  Globally, there are some 15 to 20 million news cell phone accounts opened up every month.

The cell phone has obviously changed the way we communicate.  We are all available all the time no matter where we are.  Text messaging is a new form of communication that did not …

People started using computers outside the corporate research lab in the 1950s.  The early computers created in garages were brought to market in the mid 1970s.  The PC came out in 1981.  The 1990s saw the early explosive growth of the laptop and the current decade is when the PDA and other wireless devices took off.  This 50 year history is punctuated by various breakthroughs in the computer human interface.  Each one of these breakthroughs changed usage, behavior and ultimately society.

Mainframe computing of the 1950s looked like a technological religion.  Well lit, air conditioned rooms housed large computers that were …