Hello,

I've seen Brice on the belgian televevision, presenting new developments on the Internet. The program was called something like cybercafé. Brice was very active and gave nice explanations in order for us to understand better this new and upcoming technology. Does someone remember the name of the program? Has someone seen the program ?

Luxe

In the long run I have to agree with Chris. However the OSS community played (and will continue to play) a crucial role in the development of solid web standards.

Mike: I don't think we're anywhere near the needed bandwidth for killer web applications, despite client-side capabilities nowadays...

Apart from the one-hit wonders, there is indeed a slow but fundamental shift going on. Who said "things you expect to arrive in 2 years take much longer to arrive while thing you expect to see in 5 years, take much shorter to arrive"?
The need for open software is also driven by the fact that traditional companies are less and less location based. Mobile workers benefit the most from open software because they are not constantly on the corporate network and and move from enterprise to enterprise. A common architecture and information format benefits them clearly. There is an interesting exposition about this:
http://issj.sys-con.com/read/322903.htm

From the selection, where do I register my business....to get the best advantages! Mexico or the UK? What would you do and why?

I am about to start developing a video content site. I was wondering if anyone can recommend a Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) video streaming server, capable of supporting a high traffic website.

I am interested to see how these trends will be turned into real innovation (which means that they are integrated in a working business model). I do think that not only the 'big players' are important in this context, but that it will be interesting to see whether or not new companies are able to build real business upon these new trends (and by this I don't mean create a hype-something that can be sold quickly for a lot of money, but durable business).

I would suggest an equally important shift in 2007 will be social media. I am not talking about Facebook, or MySpace. This is the capability to interact, and use internet to make business work, replacing the work traditionally accomplished by office personnel will be a reality in 07 (imho)

My business is based on providing SMEs in Switzerland with Open Source solutions for their CRM, sales force automation. CMS, Applicant tracking systems, ERP and office productivity tools as well as hosting, servicing and support...and all this from my SOHO. My clients (mostly budding entrepreneus anyway) have a complete web-enabled productivity solution for less than the license fee of Sharepoint server... OK still some rough edges (Data Security is always an issue) but with a bit of thinking and hard work it is possible to create the collective streamlined solution that jpcb mentions...

About what said Chris "Big Players are able to deliver far more streamlined packages than the OSS community" . I don't agree.. If you check sourceforge, you will see much more profiled products than could ever produce (and they cover more topics). Besides, OSS produces competition, Microsoft, for example, only have one CRM solutions... there are thousands of OSS CRM Solutions and they all benetif from the competition :)

jcpb - Your idea of profit sharing within/between companies to build a streamlined product is something that has been done before, and I think it works.

Contrary to chris' comment, I think the problem with the big players is that they aren't providing streamlined packages, they are providing bloated, buggy products that are attempting to serve too many end user types. On top of it all, it's costly and time consuming to maintain these applications. If they had the agility to provide tailored solutions that scale (both up and *down*) and were easy to maintain, then the story would be different.

The collective 'os' you guys are bantering about could simply be the web. Web 2.0 and "live" applications (gmail, Office Live, Google Docs etc.) are what this is all about. You don't need an OS, just a browser that accesses the web, and the application lives on the server. Storage space is central, maintenance is central etc.