David Elstein Former CEO of Channel 5 on the future of broadcasting
So far, interactive TV isn't truly interactive - you only access things the programmers decide for you - but the future will bring addressable adverts. Instead of seeing a stream of general adverts, your set top box will receive a batch of ads, each targeted to individual consumers. Consumers will select the types of ads they do or don't want to see and be able to click through to more information if interested.

A key player in 2001 is Sky. When exactly do they switch to the analogue signal? They've paused to take a breath now they have reached 5-6 million digital subscribers. But they have a half a million remaining analogue subscribers - do they abandon them? When the subsidising of free set-top boxes runs out there'll be even smaller incentives for viewers to convert to digital.

Now the BBC and ITV have seen the colour of the governments white paper - it's more green than white - the next year will see them campaigning hard for concessions. We're not likely to see legislation until 2002-3. But does this mean we will see the regulatatory body Ofcom created ahead of the legislation? How long can they juggle these balls for? Fortunately the broadcasting industry is stable. But the for the regulators the situation is very uncertain.

Ian Pearson BT's Futureologist on mobile phones in 2001
A lot of companies are bringing out mobile devices in order to get their hands dirty before the full arrival of third generation [3G] phones in 2002. 3G is an "always on" technology, high bandwidth packet-based system which gives you similar functionality as WAP but you don't have to dial up and wait 30 seconds to connect to the internet. Companies will be bringing out devices with bigger screens.

Clicking icons removes the need for people to be IT geeks and I think you'll see a raft of appliances that will bring high functionality at low cost with high ease of use.

Phones could be used to "locate" a person. You could have a tracking provider that offers a service you could open to your friends. They could know where you are. If they had gone to the pub and wanted to know whether you were still in the country or had headed abroad for a weekend, they could access the database.

Obviously companies wouldn't let people access your info without your permission, but it would be under your control. The industry comes down very strongly on the side of civil liberties.

This year we'll see the disappearance of the boundaries between hand-held devices and mobiles. With 3G or GPRS, your phone is permanently connected to the 'net, if you link it to your palm pilot, your diary could be constantly updated by a secretary in the office. Different systems all become integrated together which gives people flexibility. Position-based services, provided they're authorised, are possible. Passing shops could let you know of the availability of products or offers you've requested. GPRS will allow positional accuracy of within a few metres, more than enough for shop services of this type. There's no limit to the range of services people can invent for this. For the customer it's just benefits, benefits, benefits.

There will be enormous numbers of services coming out at ridiculously low prices to encourage people to use them. I think we'll see more and more adverts coming to phones, especially position-based adverts. There are simply loads of ways of recovering cash from the system, I think we'll even see many new ones being invented by people we haven't thought of during the year.

Chris Le Tocq Research Director-Desktop Software, User Productivity Gartner Research and Advisory Services on the future of computing in 2001
2001 is looking like an important year for Microsoft. We've seen the arrival of a new President and Attorney General. Will the degree of pressure be kept on Microsoft in the anti-trust legal proceedings? There is some risk that anti-trust lawyers might be told to hold off. Elsewhere, Microsoft are launching Windows 2000 for consumers. A new version of Office will come out. They're launching their web-based Microsoft.net subscription service. Will people go for a service that means you rent programmes per year and not buy them outright? In the long run this won't be cost effective for people. Microsoft are planning to rent it at 50% of the cost of outright buying. I think it should be more like 25%. But Microsoft are trying to get past the problem that people don't update their software as much as Microsoft would like.

The hand held devices market is evolving very quickly. There are two types of devices: data first/voice recognition second - in other words PDAs - and phone first/data second. The phone devices have a real leg in the market. But these two should converge. The key players like Palm, Casio and Handspring must find ways to add functionality to their PDAs. There are signs these companies have big plans on the drawing board.

Finally, we'll see the emergence of centralised information systems. Large webstores that mean wherever you switch on your device you'll have access to your personalised information.

Gavin Robertson CEO of Music Indie, the commercial wing of the Association Of Independent Musicians [AIM] on the future of Digital Music
I don't think there will be anything of the profile of Napster next year. New media is geared towards a consumption model - paying according to how you consume. The industry has been pushing ownership models, because that's what they understand through retail. The internet and new distribution mediums are pretty unsuitable to ownership models. What Napster did was point out the paradox of trying to force an ownership model onto a distribution medium that's ideally suited towards consumption pricing. To me, that's been truly pointed out. I don't think the industry will be caught off-guard to the same extent.

You then have to work out what the value of music is to the consumer and how they're willing to pay for it, and in what way. Rather than assume the way they bought music is the way they're always going to buy it. I think subscription models are key. My only worry is that people won't research it properly and try and use models that don't work. There are very many ways of doing this. People get excited about music on phones but they don't really understand how they're going to use it. It sounds like a good idea - but does the customer really want it? There's a lot of work going into technology research but not enough going into market research as to what the technology is serving.

Businesses get really excited about ideas but forget to ask the consumer if they really want them. It doesn't matter what business-to-business there is, there's a consumer in the end.

The next year will see an identification of what people want to listen to and how to serve it to them. I think internet radio has huge potential but I'm still not convinced it's the best use of the bandwidth. The problem with internet radio is the more people listen to it, the more expensive it gets for the company. It's not like radio where you have a flat cost, no matter how many people listen. It means you have to develop a revenue model that's focused far more directly on your audience.

But at what point does internet radio become customised jukebox? Radio is more than just music: it's actually communicating with some peer community, that is giving you information, music and everything that is part of your community. To have something geared just to your own dispassionate personal listening is not necessarily what radio is about.

I believe, even for the next year, that the internet is an exceptionally good way to find out what CDs you want to buy. It's the biggest problem this industry has: people buy far too many CDs they don't like and then complain they're too expensive. MP3s are a different market. It's the punk of our generation but I certainly believe we don't need the knee jerk reactions that have been happening. If people say, 'I'm going to down load an MP3 and not buy a CD', it is a persuasive argument. But it's not seen any marketing to back it up.

Someone on a think tank said to me 'anyone who stands up and says how much they're doing in the internet is as well imagining themselves, in years to come, standing up and proclaiming with great pride that their company uses electricity.' You have to be there with the internet and you should be embarrassed if you're not there - not proud if you are. That's a psychological shift that will go on next year as well. It becomes something you're not doing rather than something you are. As soon as it moves into the main consciousness, the whole relationship and the way the internet develops changes as well. We're at that edge now.

Eva Pascoe Joint managing director of Zoom.co.uk on e-commerce in 2001
One tricky area this year will be the integration of e-commerce into government, so you will be able to pay your parking tickets online. Do I get a lot of parking tickets? Oh man, don't even go there!

I think the second area is the integration of telephone payments online and upping your credit limit for pay-as-you-go online. Perhaps all the networks were too busy flogging phones to be thinking about elegant customer service which is truly multi-channel. But I can sense it happening - with Chris Smith and Vodafone Interactive - Chris is a smart guy.

The third one is utilities, I still can't pay most of my bills online. If you look at British Gas, London Electricity and a number of water people - perhaps Thames Water - they're all looking seriously at it. It'll be market channel payment systems - so you can pay by phone or online. In terms of ease of life, these three are pretty fundamental. We think about e-commerce in terms of the nice things in life. But if you think how much time you spend on hygiene - we could give the average consumer a day a month back - by saving them from queuing in various places. I think this is more important than the nice things online because the nice things will happen anyway.

I expect a lot of people to go back to online advertising and emailing this year. With advertising going offline, a lot of agencies made a lot of money but it was completely pointless. If you look at your customers, offline, you're never looking at more than a quarter of them. It's a ridiculously expensive way of building and maintaining the brand. If your customers are online then talk to them online. Online ads will be popular as long as their impact is measurable.

Erol Ziya Spokesman for Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunication [CUTs] on telecommunications in 2001.
The Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications [CUTs] are looking for a stable dial-up market to emerge based on Flat Rate Internet Access Call Origination [FRIACO] and FRIACO-single tandem. That is a determination by Oftel which forces BT to sell access to the local loop at a flat rate. This allows ISPs to offer sustainable unmetered products. Unlike the first round of unmetered access, the industry is starting to develop retail products based on those wholesale products, the first being AOL's.

Finally we will be able to get down to the business of sorting the good ISPs from the bad. Once you've got a level, wholesale environment where the right products can be offered I think -naturally - the good ISPs will float to the top and the bad ones will sink.

The next year should be a much more healthy year for unmetered dial up access. That said, there is going to be great problems with 'local loop unbundling [LLU]' - allowing other operators into exchanges. The availability of broadband, that's the next battle front. There are no options at the moment; you can only buy BT's Ignite. Supposedly, LLU will solve this by allowing a whole range of people to put equipment in the exchanges. But that is going to be a much more tortuous and slower process than people imagine. I don't think you are going to see a proper range of broadband products within a year from now - maybe even longer. Again, BT is the key player in this and one of the key elements is whether they go ahead with this plan of spinning of the network from the retail services: the Netco idea. That could have a serious impact on the speed of roll out of broadband. There's unlikely to be Altavista-style problems because they should be solved by Friaco. People are a lot more cautious now.

A lot of fingers got burnt by trying to deliver unmetered narrowband. I think this is going to be a very interesting area over the next year. Ultimately, it is inevitable that some break up of BT will happen, but the real question is to what degree it's done on BT's terms. Within the ISPs we see the move to focussing on getting some input. At the moment, BT is fairly confident that it can decide the terms on which it could spin off Netco. But again, I think there's a bigger picture there. I think it goes beyond the specific needs of BT's requirements. We may see calls for government and regulatory interference in the process as to how BT splits off the various divisions.

James Stevens co-founder http://Consume.net
[Interview by Sean Dodson]
The gross commercialisation of the internet has been followed by the inevitable collapse in confidence. It gives us the moment to take stock of our position and consider some options.

The Consume initiative is presenting a strategy for user constructed networking. One that short circuits corporate media hegemony and flips the lid on monopolisation of national networks. A growing range of inexpensive wireless products looks set to further dissolve control over telecommunications in particular data network structure and quality of access. Thinking local and acting aware, asserting rights and sharing information, principals that underpin the open source software network, are crossing back over into community and will proliferate.

I feel optimistic for the coming year, with the farce of the millennium behind us and corporate slime under closer watch (never close enough), let those with the will and the wit take the initiative to debunk corporatisation and assert the duty of care. The lead for this effort has been taken by the various Indy Media centres around the world (http://www.indymedia.org), with ongoing work of grass roots organisations like Undercurrents and legal analysts Ecotort. I would also like to mention the work of www.lowtech.org whose work unlocks the potential of redundant technology and raises issues of pollution in computer manufacture and disposal.

The net is rich with the evidence of creative and conscious comment, free from commercial pressure and ready to tangle with the forces of exploitation.