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At the beginning of this year, analyst firm Gartner released a report that highlights eight up-and-coming mobile technologies which they predict will impact the mobile industry over the course of the next two years. According to Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at the firm, the technologies they've identified will evolve quickly and will likely pose issues that will have to be addressed by short term strategies.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is "the great challenge of the age," Schmidt said in an interview in front of thousands of CIOs and IT Directors at last week's Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009.

Gartner is the largest and most respected analyst firm in the world and much of what Schmidt said in his 45 minute interview was directed specifically at business leaders, but we've excerpted 6 minutes that we believe is of interest to anyone who's touched by the web.

One exabyte is a billion gigabytes. It's one quintillion bytes. And yes, "quintillion" is a number so large, it almost seems made-up. But that's how much online video will be consumed by 2017, according to new reports from U.K.-based research firm Coda. Actually, to be precise, they're claiming that mobile broadband users accessing the net via laptops and netbooks will consume 1.8 exabytes of video. Per month.

Moore's Law, the observation that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit has doubled every two years, explains the exponential growth in computing power that enables all the innovation we web-heads love so much. Futurist Ray Kurzweil argues that the exponential growth of computing power extends beyond the history of the integrated circuit, though. Exponential growth in computing happened as a result of innovations prior to the circuit board and it will continue after the integrated circuit's dominance has been surpassed, Kurzweil believes.

Steve Jurvetson, one of the best-known technology investors in the world, has posted an updated version of Kurzweil's visualization of the history of exponential growth in computing. In his thought provoking discussion of the phenomenon, Jurvetson calls this "the most important chart in technology business."

The year was 2013. Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg was still the social network's public persona, but he had a young family and new-found loves of world travel, exotic regional cocktails and faux-native art. Facebook had become overgrown with spammy apps and awkwardly targeted advertisements. The company quietly gave Zuckerberg a huge salary to pursue those other interests and leave product development and the business in the hands of other people. There was no denying it - Facebook was on the decline as Social Network XYZ rose to global social networking supremacy.

But what in this future scenario will Social Network XYZ be? As the sands of time wash MySpace into obscurity, with a wave of hundreds of employees being let go this week for example, now seems like a good time to think about what comes next. What could kill Facebook, the MySpace killer? We've identified four possible scenarios - which do you think is most likely? Most desirable?

Analyst firm Gartner has just released a report that highlights eight up-and-coming mobile technologies which they predict will impact the mobile industry over the course of the next two years. According to Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at the firm, the technologies they've identified will evolve quickly and will likely pose issues that will have to be addressed by short term strategies.