Tech Boom II: five years, five technologies.

• Author: Smith, Mark
• Position: Technology boom

Harry Dent, an economist and author of "The Next Great Bubble Boom," says this year marks the beginning of the next technology boom--and it should last through late 2009. Fueled by baby boomers, now at their peak earning and investing years, the party will, however, be over in 2010, according to Dent, when a huge number of boomers retire and start pulling money out of the stock market. Nevertheless, the next five years will be a great ride for technology, both for investment and development purposes, and especially for wireless, broadband service, security, personal media, and health-care technology.

Since two-thirds of the U.S. economy is driven by consumer spending and only a third of it by business-to-business spending (information technology spending declined from 2000 through 2003), technology players like Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Dell have focused on the consumer side of their technology development. Yet each of those mentioned technologies, or their variations, will eventually end up inside of small businesses.

So, it's important to watch the trends to see if you can take advantage of the movement of personal tech into your business day. And because consumer technology ships in huge quantities, use of it in the business arena will drive down prices there as well.

Here then are five technologies you should monitor to gauge their effects on your business in the next half decade.

WIRELESS

Boomers love the flexibility to work anywhere, anytime, and stay connected. Any device that delivers on that goal and saves you money is worthy of a Boomer's attention. Wireless phone companies are making it easier to provide mobile phones for every member of the household. With so many mobile phones in the hands of consumers, the mobile phone is one of the highest priorities for technology developers.

Starting in 2005, wireless phones will be replacing wireline (i.e. home) phones in huge numbers. In-Stat, a telecom research company, forecasts that consumer wireline expenditures will decline from $188.1 billion in 2003 to $160.2 billion by the end of 2008. The hardest hit segment among those fixed-base services will be consumer voice.

In fact, many younger Americans, ages 18 to 24, who move out on their parents' homes will never own a wireline phone. They have grown up with cellular and can't see the need for wireline. In 2005, however, many older Americans also will say goodbye to their wireline phones and move their home phone numbers to cellular or broadband phone service using voice-over Internet protocol (VoIP).

Already marketing that trend, Illinois-based...