Technology Predictions 2010 (Part 1)

Foreword

Welcome to the 2010 edition of Technology Predictions. This is the ninth year in which the Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (DTT) Global Technology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT) Industry Group has published predictions on the TMT sectors.

This year's report has three principal themes: the economy, digitization, and CleanTech.

First, the global economy: if there was one advantage to making predictions for 2009, it was the consensus that most major economies were expected to fall into recession. (They did, with a few notable exceptions, such as Brazil, India, and China.) In 2010, the picture is far more mixed. While it is generally agreed that most economies should recover, there do not appear to be enough shapes or letters available to describe the possible permutations that recovery may take — will it be a U, a V, a W, or a square-root recovery? And the possibility remains of a double-dip recession, once the stimulus ends. At the time of