23andme
This company offers you to connect yourself to your DNA , for $999 you can get your DNA analyzed. 2008 will see more people using this service and different ideas that can be implemented using 23andme. What do you think about DNA based Matchmaking or Social Networking? Whatever be the case it is bound to generate a lot of talk in the coming year.
Twitter
Evan Williams, founder of Twitter (and Blogger.com) might get second time lucky with the craze of micro-blogging reaching new heights . Twitter will became a juicy acquisition target. But it cannot be Google who pays Evan this time since they already bought jaiku. Microsoft still needs a success in publishing space, they might became interested in Twitter.
Mahalo
Human powered search is gaining huge interest this year with wikia and mahalo the major players in this field. 2008 will see the rise in popularity of these services as people look to move beyond Google. Mahalo has a neat interface and is funded well, it might attract the interest of the big search engine players like Yahoo, which has it's own popular human powered Answers service.
Admob
Mobile advertising is going to became more and more important , with Google only 4 months old in testing their own mobile advertising service. Admob which has served already 12 billion impressions to mobiles is going to make headlines. Admob was founded in 2005 and is likely to became a target for acquisition given that 3 major ad networks were acquired this year as well.
Linkedin
2007 was the year of Facebook and the next year might get lucky for Linkedin. The company has a paid subscription model for premium services unlike other social networks which depend only on advertising. This year may see Linkedin growing to became the preferred service for professionals given the recent problems of privacy and spam on Facebook .
