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Happy new year, I hope Santa brought you every­thing you wished for (obvi­ously if you opted for peace on Earth you may have been some­what disappointed).

It’s cus­tom­ary at this time of year to make pre­dic­tions for the 12 months ahead. Of course, this is largely an exer­cise in ensur­ing you look pretty stu­pid at the end of the year. (It’s almost as if, sim­ply by pre­dict­ing the future, you can guar­an­tee that it won’t come to pass.) So with that in mind, and not want­ing to pass up the oppor­tu­nity of look­ing stu­pid, here are mine:

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There has been a raft of inter­est­ing arti­cles and posts lately look­ing at alter­na­tives to tra­di­tional desktop-based soft­ware. Some, like the peo­ple at Vit­a­min, are look­ing to reduce the cost by mov­ing to a pri­mar­ily open source solu­tion. Oth­ers, like Sam at TechCrunch UK, are explor­ing the web OS approach, tak­ing advan­tage of the plethora of new web-based apps that are spring­ing up (and gen­er­ally being bought by Google). And yet oth­ers are cau­tion­ing that there is a need for both desk­top and web-based soft­ware.

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There is a say­ing in NLP that goes some­thing like “If you only have one choice you are a robot, if you have two you are in a dilemma, it’s only when you have three or more that you have real choice.”

So it is with oper­at­ing sys­tems. For most peo­ple, there is a choice of one, the Win­dows that was pre-installed on their PC when they bought it. For a small minor­ity, there’s also the Apple OSX option. And then, of course there’s Linux. But Linux is scary for most peo­ple. Despite the friendly pen­guin, it is still the domain of the the alpha-geek.

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Strat­egy + Busi­ness mag­a­zine has a nice arti­cle on co-creation fea­tur­ing Cisco and P&G among oth­ers (dis­clo­sure: Cisco is a Ban­ner client). It’s a good advo­cacy piece on get­ting the cus­tomer involved.

We’ve seen the ben­e­fits of this our­selves. Where as before we might have done the usual focus group thing (get 8 peo­ple in a room, show them some ideas and then cry when they don’t like them) more recently we’ve taken a dif­fer­ent approach.

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This is a Chumby (the thing with the screen, not the cof­fee cup). And, out of the box, it doesn’t do a hell of a lot. OK, it does come with a clock/radio and – this is the impor­tant bit – a wire­less inter­net connection.

The inter­net con­nec­tion gives you access to an ever increas­ing range of Flash-based wid­gets that you can use to add extra func­tions to your Chumby. Using the touch-screen or squeeze-sensor, you can view pho­tos on Flickr, the lat­est news from Digg or your day ahead on Google Cal­en­dar – and in future, who knows what else. Of course if that was all, it wouldn’t be that inter­est­ing (wid­gets are not exactly new news).

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