Retail/Consumer Payment Solutions will continue to evolve with the broad introduction of NFC (near field communications), SQUARE, and the like -- I don't think either of these will "take off" in 2011, but their presence will become widely known.
Cord Cutting / Web TV will find its stride in 2011. By mid-year most every new TV will be web-enabled... following in the trends of Boxee, Netflix, Apple TV, Roku, and Google TV. There will still be A LOT of heat in the rights/distribution world, but hopefully, the content companies will see the true value in web-delivery.
Chrome OS will not initially take off - most Google products take years/cycles to gain traction, but Chrome will set the benchmark for the introduction of cloud operating systems.
Carrier Consolidation will happen in 2011. This will come in two different ways:
- Existing carriers will start buying-out the budget, "pay-to-play" carriers, like ATS, Cricket, etc... as well as some of the regional carriers like US Cellular.
- One of the big OS companies will finally buy one of the carriers. Buyers could be Google, Apple, MSFT, etc... Sellers could be one of those listed above, or even Tmob or Clear. This is a long-shot, because the carrier business is a terrible one to be in.... but someone has to take a stab at it.
There WILL BE a massive security breach on Facebook or Twitter.
Vivendi and/or Shanda tries to buy Zynga for outrageous sum -- Zynga will deny.
Glenn Kellman calls Amazon the only sustainable internet company today. We will see further innovation and investment between low-tech and high-tech. There are only so many steps that technology can remove from the equation... brick-n-mortar will again become a focus for truly sustainable tech companies. (think Google and a carrier/broadcast company).