Whilst it's slightly early for the prediction season, I thought I'd put forward a few possibilities, based on some digital crystal gazing, some wistful looking off into space, a finger in the air and some personal perspective. Some of these may even come true.

Nokia released their latest Lumina smartphone to the most desultory of audience applause - but is it good or bad? Actually, I'm not going to discuss that - it has it's good points, in terms of wireless charging and camera technology, and it's bad ones - poor PR in faking its performance in an advert, for example. But are these the factors that will make buy it, or not?

The internet is wonderful - I can use it to find out how to mend my tumble drier, choose between different cameras and buy one, look at where to go on holiday and, keeping an eye on the changing prices, pick a time to buy a flight/book a ferry; I can search for a good hotel and book that, and can find out what others are reading and order my books as well. Life couldn't be better.

Recent rulings by a US Judge that Apple's approach to keeping its software locked onto its hardware are not actually secrets have taken an unexpected turn. Recent prototypes by a French company show the iPhone OS running on a Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

The Digital Economy is our saviour, according to the government. It's not just them: the Boston Consulting Group said, in 2010, that the UK internet economy is larger, per head, than in any other country, and is forecast to grow by 10% a year.

The UK makes a lot of its place in the knowledge economy, at times seemingly relying on it to drive us out of recession and back to growth. And we have been previously successful in this - the recent sale of Autonomy to HP provides commercial evidence for this.

But will this continue? Does the Knowledge Economy have such a bright future?

Imagine knowing that you can get across Birmingham anytime of day within 40-45 minutes maximum by public transport, and journeys half-way across within 20 or so minutes.

How would that change your travel patterns? And how, do you suppose it'd affect communities in this city? That's what Londoners have . . .

Looking at these two maps, one of Brum, t'other of London (courtesy of the brilliant crowd-sourced OpenStreetMap), and you can begin to grasp some of the social impact that connectivity has.

See the circles? Their diameters represent 10km.

It's that time of year when all and sundry (especially journalists, hacks, pundits and loudmouths) make predictions about the future, and in particular the next twelve months.

So here's my personal take on what will happen next year: some is informed guesswork, some is speculation, and some will accidentally turn out to be fact.....

I try and write a piece for the first of every month - this month I've spectacularly failed. Part of this is because I decided to 'update' my computers, which seemed to do exactly the opposite.

One of the recent trends in technology is the move to the cloud. But what does this mean for people, and why is it happening?