This time of year it is a great deal of fun to look at trends and directions to determine what will be big in 2008. Suffice it to say, the coming year may be one of the most remarkable we have ever seen in the technology industry.

Perhaps the biggest trend of all is the growing phenomenon of "living off the web." Think of what the iPhone offers: a truly portable, high performance browser. It creates the possibility of your world—everything you are and know—being contained and made available wherever you go. So you no longer have to be concerned about leaving anything behind, including your laptop, your phone, or (perhaps most important) your personal information, such as music, photos, e-mail, games, and financial records.

Here are some of the other trends that will bring us closer to this reality in 2008.

The phase-out of optical and magnetic PC storage

Just as it was with magnetic tape, it will likely take a long while for optical to work its way out of the market. However, it is clear that CDs and DVDs of all types are on a near- term path to obsolescence. Car manufacturers, which typically lag the market, are pulling CD players out, and many of the initial big supporters of DVDs, Blu-ray, and HD DVD are moving vigorously in switching to download services as a way to distribute multimedia.

Increasingly, game systems like Xbox 360 are pulling content down from the Web, and it is expected that the next generation of these systems won't have optical drives at all. PC hard drives will start their phase-out as well, with hybrid hard drives and solid-state Turbo Memory eventually giving way to solid-state drives, which have already entered the market at the high end. Benefits will include smaller, lighter laptops and PCs, greater security, more reliability, and faster performance. We've already seen this happen with portable DVD and CD players moving to products like the iPod Touch, and in 2008 it agressively begins moving to laptops.

We can probably thank Apple and iTunes for sparking this trend back at the beginning of the decade.

Software/storage as a service

If we are losing our optical and magnetic drives, where then does the media go? To the great hard drive in the sky, but this time it will be a good thing. We have been moving toward storage-as-a-service for some time—Geek Squad online data backup is one example—and toward centralized storage repositories within enterprises. What's new is the idea that storage of applications and end users' data will be supplied as a service to homes, small businesses, and even some large enterprises by a variety of vendors and service providers. For example, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) allows developers to use Amazon's storage infrastructure to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on a low cost, pay-as-you-go basis.

What makes this real is the availability of high-bandwidth wired and—with Wi-Fi and the new WiMax services—wireless services, which make living off the Web vastly more convenient. This trend encompasses hosted efforts, like those being intensively driven by Google, as well as a huge effort by companies like Napster, Rhapsody, and Amazon to increasingly push media up to the Web and serve it down to a variety of devices. This latter capability dovetails with new hardware efforts, like Microsoft's Home Server, which will connect back to these services for even greater capability, security, and utility.

In 2008 we should reach a point of penetration where we can say storage-as-a-service has arrived.

Security 2.0

For storage-as-a-service and other trends to take hold, we (and our data) need to be safe in our travels, and today we are anything but, as rising rates of identity theft attest. In fact, cyber criminals have become so aggressive that companies like Symantec have had to rethink how they will provide security in 2008.

One of the biggest problems is the existence of huge, centrally controlled botnets that are used to aggregate personal information. A mini-goldmine, this data is sold on the black market, where it is used to commit credit fraud, enriching the thieves and ruining the consumer's good name. In response, there is a move away from securing just the PC, network, and servers to securing users themselves, regardless of what client they are using or where they are located.

Think of this as your own digital bodyguard, represented by a suite of software and services to help ensure that your identity, property, and family remain safe. Increasingly, solutions will require users to learn practices that will make Security 2.0 solutions more effective. All of this represents one of the most powerful and well-funded efforts coming out of a variety of security companies and one of the only ways to address the enormous threat of identity and data theft that is plaguing the industry.

The 3D Web

As people become accustomed to living off the Web, navigating one's "stuff" and visiting one's favorite "places" become big challenges, ones that are driving the emergence of the 3D Web. Think of being able to physically wander through websites that look like libraries, offices, or homes, where you interact with objects that have many of the same characteristics as physical objects in the real world. In this world, you can create a virtual home or office that mirrors your physical space and use it as a place to store your music, photos, and personal records and test products like office equipment, furniture, artwork, and appliances.

Think of a growing class of experts who will help you create these virtual worlds and also help you transition your ideas into the real world. Now take another step and imagine the worlds you might create from your fantasies, and imagine that some of these could also transition into the real world.

We are at the very beginning of this trend, which will become more evident in 2008. For example, the 3D Web is at the core of a recent partnership between IBM and Linden Lab and is one of the trends Intel's own CTO has called out as being significant. Today, the 3D Web is in the same phase of growth as the Internet was in the early 1990s, when we lived in properties like AOL and CompuServe. Second Life is the new AOL, and new Netscape-like companies, such as SceneCaster, are beginning to build common tools to make this happen. In fact, as it matures, the 3D Web could prove as dramatic a change as the Internet turned out to be.

Wrapping up

The year 2008 will usher in major changes, encompassing hardware, the Web, users' data, and security. Many of these developments won't be fully understood for a long time to come, but we can start enjoying the benefits they bring in the New Year.