With the end of the year approaching it?s survey season for crystal ball analysts, who want to be seen as ahead of the crowd. Who I ask will follow up ten years from now to see if they?re right?

Still here?s some predictive fodder you can use to impress your friends, even if you?ve never used a carbon nanotube or RSS.

The first ?heads-up? survey is by the Gartner group, which highlights what it labels as ?key emerging technologies? in its ?hype cycle?.

The ?Hype Cycle? highlights the progression of an emerging technology from conception, to market over-enthusiasm, through a period of disillusionment to an eventual understanding of the technology?s relevance and role in a market or domain.

The report, which has been running for ten years is meant to help companies by either preventing them from invest prematurely in a technology because it is being hyped or it may also help point them to technologies they may be ignoring just because it is not living up to early expectations.

?For technologies that will have lower impact on your business, let others learn the difficult lessons, and then adopt the technologies when they are more mature,? Gartner advises.

?It?s less a matter of don?t believe the hype and more a case of do believe the hype but only in the wider context of the market place, potential applications and ultimately the relevance to your business today and tomorrow.?

In this year?s report Gartner assesses the impact and adoption speed of 44 technologies and trends it has identified as key over the coming decade.

Key technologies include podcasting, peer-to-peer (P2P) voice over IP (VoIP), desktop search services, really simple syndication (RSS) services, corporate blogging and Wikis.

Next generation architecture is pinpointed as the third big era in the IT industry?s history.

For those who missed it, the first was called the hardware era and the second belonged to software. Service oriented architecture (SOA) is part of the next generation.

SOA uses interactive business components designed to be meaningful and usable across applications or enterprises. Gartner expects support for SOA to grow and for it to mature despite early problems.

Web services-enabled business models are seen as productivity boosting. They represent a new approach to doing business among enterprises and consumers through Web services.

Gartner believes that such web services will have to wait for more-mature standards and clearer examples of success before the take-off stage is achieved.

Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) also sits in the picture as a ?transforming? technology.

XBRL is an Extensible-Markup-Language-defined standard for analysing, exchanging and reporting financial information. XBRL helps organisations meet multiple financial reporting needs through a single instance of financial data, Gartner says.

It also improves the timeliness and accuracy of financial and regulatory reporting, validation and distribution, a key feature in the new demands for transparency.

However, there have been setbacks in XBRL adoption in the past year. The most significant have been delays in US and UK regulatory projects that will mandate XBRL reporting.

Business process platforms (BPP) are another type of software architecture that aims to provide business process flexibility and adaptability.

BPP uses SOA design principles and are metadata and model driven.

Looking back over ten years of Hype Cycles, Gartner notes that videoconferencing, handwriting recognition and speech recognition are still featured ten years later on as they struggle toward mainstream adoption.

On a more down-to-earth level PricewaterhouseCoopers has released a survey that could mean good news for your pocket if you are a top-notch technology worker.

A survey of industry executives by the firm found that they pinpointed intense competition from both established companies and new ventures, and the fierce battle for talent as their most significant challenges.

Fierce battles for talent means top dollar if you?re good. While the pace of change in the tech industry has moderated, executives say they must remain flexible in their strategies, business models and cultures.

Competition from well-established companies was cited by 48 percent of respondents as the top potential risk they face, followed by attracting employees and expertise (42 percent) and emergence of new start-up competitors (31 percent).

The survey also found that executives believe the pace of change in the technology industry is slowing. Respondents listed convergence to digital services (75 percent) and economic expansion in Europe (64 percent), China (63 percent) and India (62 percent as having the greatest positive impact on technology companies over the next ten years.

When asked which events or trends of the coming decade will be regarded in 100 years as the most important, most executives chose the growth of the Internet, the emergence of China and rise of information-driven consumer power.

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