Martin,

I’m not sure if this is the next BIGGEST thing, but one growth area I see is the use of mobile messaging to send customer service notifications, account alerts, and similar notifications from a customer perspective, to the customer’s mobile device.

Car dealerships alerting you that it’s been X months since your last service; hosting companies sending a mobile alert if a company exceeds it disk usage; banks and financial institutions sending alerts in the case of account overdrafts so that you can go and make a deposit to avoid bounced check fees; etc.

These capabilities are fairly easy to put in place today, and many companies are already providing such notification/alert services.

An interesting part of this question that I didn’t really touch on was the notebook. Since you included “notebook” in your question, it’s worth commenting on too. Obviously, netbooks are huge, but if you ask me, they aren’t really “enterprise-ready” devices because they change too often and typically aren’t quite powerful enough to make business users happy. They are also too small for many people as far as screen size and keyboards go. On the other hand, 12” and 13” notebooks keep getting lighter and more powerful. You can get a nice 2.5 pound 12” notebook at reasonable prices today. Two or three years from now, though, you’ll probably be looking for a slate-style, touchscreen tablet that weighs 1-2 pounds. I could really see people using those extensively in a business environment. It would be just like carrying around a paper notepad. The key to the success of a product like that is great software, though, so make sure the software is matching well with the hardware.