I'm looking back at 2007 in terms of products that illustrate ideas, attitudes and markets you'll need to watch in the coming year.

* First up is the Meraki Mini (www.meraki.com), a wireless router that takes a wired Net connection and creates a Wi-Fi network around it.

The beauty of the concept is that you can easily string Minis together. A second Mini within range of the first picks up the signal and expands the coverage area. Meraki says that it is targeting the Internet's next billion users, building networks worldwide that allow shared connections and challenge the economics of Net access. A Meraki Mini is as cheap as $50 and scales up to thousands of users. Backed by Google, Meraki is going to make waves.

* My biggest gripe against smart phones is that their screens are too small to do meaningful work. Then I ran into Opera Mini.

The browser, from a Norwegian company whose full-size Opera is a sound alternative to the bigger brands, uses a slick zoom feature that gets the most out of a tiny workspace. The other upside: Opera compresses the page you're after for a fast download; it's free at www.opera.com.

* Keep an eye on the fortunes of Amazon's Kindle, and weigh them against the iPhone story.

Kindle has been flayed by the media for its lack of design smarts (those big page-turning buttons make it too easy to flip ahead in your book), but on-board wireless and a huge library make it a potent step forward for electronic books. IPhone showed how brilliant interface design can snare large audiences, but the task now is to produce killer third-party programs.

Both these devices change how we do things, and in both cases, their version 2.0 editions will incorporate improvements that should be breathtaking.

* Operating-system woes plagued us in 2007, with Microsoft's Vista prompting many a user to "upgrade" back to XP. That's a trend that can't continue.

Keep an eye on virtualization, which allows you to run several operating systems. VMWare's Fusion for OS X is one example. You can run Windows on a Mac, or, for that matter, Linux, operating smoothly between programs without the need to reboot every time. Spreading into the open-source community, virtualization expands our options and means that in the future you won't have to be tied to a single manufacturer's choices for the machine you use every day.

* Online software is getting better step by step, and nobody is pushing the envelope harder than Zoho (www.zoho.com).

You can get the big applications -- spreadsheet, word processor and e-mail -- from Google as well, but Zoho's business orientation is more feature-rich. At $40 per year, Zoho is cheaper than Google's $50 Apps upgrade and offers collaboration tools that Google can't match, including useful database, project management and organizer options.

* If you're interested in online software programs such as Zoho, the key question is often, "What happens when I'm not online?"

Google Gears takes care of the problem by ensuring synchronization of your online and offline data. Do your work when and where you want, then relax as your changes are uploaded to the "cloud" where Google's vast storage awaits. This is an infant offering and many online applications can't yet handle it, but the direction it points to will shape computing in the coming year.

* I'm not exactly sure where Facebook (www.facebook.com) is headed next, but as a tool for enhancing personal and professional connections, it seems to be moving ahead of its rivals.

Next page >