Highlights of Monotype Imaging’s Fonts.com Web Fonts solution:

- Over 2,000 high-quality fonts available now for free public beta
- Approximately 7,000 fonts expected by commercial launch later in 2010
- Helvetica, Frutiger and Univers typefaces among several popular designs, available for the first time as Web fonts
- More than 40 languages supported using patent-pending Monotype Imaging technology
- Subscription-based solution to include a free, entry-level tier with ability to use more than 2,000 fonts

Read the full press release here.

Acceleration in the adoption of technologies such as cloud computing and virtualisation within the enterprise will result in a fifth of businesses owning no IT assets whatsoever by 2012, according to the research findings.

The market analyst argues that while the requirement for enterprise hardware, from desktop computers to staffed data centres, will remain consistent at its current level, responsibility for this equipment will increasingly shift to third parties. These will include both external data centre and service providers, and enterprise employees themselves, of whom more and more will take advantage of their own laptops or smartphones for work purposes.

Because of this, Gartner forecasts, enterprise IT budgets will be scaled back or allocated elsewhere for more strategic projects. Subsequently, vendors will also be forced to reconsider their own strategies in order to meet these changes in the business IT landscape.

Emerging super powers and developing nations drive innovation

Due to the rise of mobile technology people in areas that have not been able to get connected now can. For example the growth on Internet usage in Africa over the last decade has grown by over 1, 300%. All the new users have new needs and most exciting of all new ideas. Speaking at a recent conference, Wikipedia co-founder, Jimmy Wales said that the new cultures, languages and ideas would “mix and match in amazing ways.”

Location based social networks

We have seen many location based applications emerge on the iPhone and established ‘Web 2.0′ sites include location based services – for example GeoTagging on Flickr. The beauty of the Internet is that anyone can contribute to any topic but that inevitably means a lot of information that isn’t relevant to a user at a moment in time. Give information a contextual quality, such as a location, means that relevant information should be easier to find and crucially more useful to the user.

As the decade progresses it is thought that this will emerge into a big industry, APIs such as those provided by Google for Google Maps and sites that you wouldn’t necessarily associate with open APIs, such as Trip Advisor enable useful applications and websites to be created.

Real-time search

It could be argued that this has started to progress and take off quite nicely, but it hasn’t quite entered everyday public use. As touched on in a previous blog post, real time search will help provide more relevant search result for users.

Magazine and Newspaper Apps

This topic has also been covered in a previous blog post but I believe we will see a lot more of these in the coming year. They have the ability to provide people with what they want, when they want it and most importantly it gives newspapers and magazines an opportunity to make money.

Someone…somewhere…will find an effective use for Google Wave

Google Wave has many detractors but as it rolls out to more and more users I think people will find it a useful tool, and that’s the point, it is a tool, it will not replace email (at least I hope not)!

Talking of finding a use we have a few ideas so watch this space.

So there you have it, we will check back in twelve months to see what happens!

I will leave you with a few other predictions from my colleagues:

• Simon predicts that the move to ban Google Analytics in Germany will fail
• Steve predicts that cloud computing will take off in a big way