In mid-December, just before the holiday rush, the Pew Internet & American Life Project issued its third re- port on the future of the internet. The survey reveals some fascinating expectations for logical advances, but the respondents disagree about the actual improvements these will make in our lives. The following are key findings from the survey that asked nearly 1,200 experts to assess predictions about technology and its roles in the year 2020:

* The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.

* The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.

* Voice recognition and touch user interfaces for the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.

* Those that enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing arms race with those that will find ways to copy and share content without payment.

* The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.

* Next-generation engineering of the network to improve the current internet architecture is more likely to happen than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.

Industry Consolidation

Given the tough economic climate and credit crunch, you might not think we'd see many acquisitions these days, but companies are still buying. There were actually a number of key sales in our industry of late - financial details were not provided. Here's a quick review.

* Congressional Quarterly, Inc. (CQ), a provider of news, analysis, and information on Congress, politics, and public policy, acquired Voxant, Inc.'s broadcast transcripts media assets. As part of the transaction, CQ acquired long-term distribution agreements to provide verbatim newsmaker transcripts to content providers, including The Associated Press; LexisNexis; Dow Jones & Co., Inc.; Thomson Reuters; FT Profile; Infonautics; Dialog; Bloomberg; NewsEdge; and Westlaw

* Gale, a part of Cengage Learning, acquired HighBeam Research, Inc. in a move designed to further expand its userbase to general web users. The deal involves the sub scrip tionbased HighBeam Research service for individuals (wwwhighbeam .com) and Encyclopedia.com (www .encyclopedia.com), which offers free reference content from the Columbia Encyclopedia, Britannica Concise Encyclopedia, Oxford University Press, and others. The deal did not include Newser, HighBeam's news site.

* Mornings tar, Inc., a provider of independent investment research, acquired Tenfore Systems, Ltd., a London- and Frankfurt- based provider of global real-time data feeds and financial data workstations.

* Google completed the purchase of 20 million digitized historical newspaper pages from Paperofrecord.com and Cold North Wind, Inc., its parent company.

* Atypon Systems, Inc., a provider of epublishing solutions, announced the acquisition of eMeta Corp., a provider of access control, subscription management, and commerce software, from Macrovision Solutions Corp.

* XING, a social networking company, purchased socialmedian, Inc., a social news company.

Ebook Reader Activity

There was a buzz in the ebook reader market in 4Q 2008. Oprah Winfrey praised the Amazon Kindle on her television show in October, and its popularity skyrocketed.