Entrepreneur Magazine has published a comprehensive list of 2006 trends forecasts and what they call hot businesses. It has a lot of great information in it.
Oh, the list is not perfect. It suffers from being too long and is not as tight as it should be. Certain trends it identifies are out there on the fringe (trailer parks become an “in” thing?). Some of the ideas are not really new (the travel trends are rehashed information from last year).
Also, it’s almost as if every tech buzzword and consumer fad has been added to the list, regardless of how relevant. Yes, we know that RFID, nanotechnology, biometrics and robots get media play as intriguing technologies. But aside from being of interest to a relatively small number of tech startups, none of those technologies is particularly relevant to the mainstream of small businesses nor will they be in 2006.
I took a quick look, I’ll go back for a bit more deapth.
My early take is it is a list that any aware folks could put together quickly.
I would have hoped for some new ideas that might pop.
That would take effort, and of course could quickly become very wrong.