The Five Big Trends for 2007
2.Transparency Tyranny
 Remember the promises of flawless matching of supply and demand, and limitless consumer power, when the web burst onto the scene a dozen years ago? While the last few years didn’t disappoint (consumers are already enjoying near-full transparency of prices and, in categories like travel and music), 2007 could be the year in which TRANSPARENCY TYRANNY really starts scaring the sh*t out of non-performing brands.
 Why? For one, 1+ billion consumers are now online, and the majority of them have been online for years. They're skilled bargain seekers and ‘best of the best’ hunters, they're avid online networkers and they're opinionated reviewers and advisors (tripadvisor.com now boasts 5,000,000+ travel reviews).
Now, for 2007, add the following:
 As camera and video phones are becoming both ubiquitous and more powerful, reviews of anything and everything will go multimedia. The impact? Well, a picture says more than a thousand words, and a video says more than a thousand pictures ;-) EVERYTHING brands do or don’t do will end up on YouTube.com, or on an undoubtedly soon to be launched YouTube-clone dedicated to product reviews.
More on those camera-phones: as they’re bound to eventually go online on a global scale (for early learnings, Japan and South Korea are the place to be, see also WEB N+1 below), consumer reviews will increasingly become real time and on the spot, i.e. expect ever-shorter gaps between a consumer experience (good or bad) and the rest of the world knowing about it.
Real-time TRANSPARENCY TYRANNY is on the rise for another reason as well: as more people are contributing, the sheer mass of reviews will lead to daily and who knows, hourly reviews on any topic imaginable.
However, the missing link in the above is profiles: the onslaught of recommendations needs some transparency of its own. After all, what good is a recommendation if it’s from someone leading a different STATUS LIFESTYLE than your own? Expect a host of new TWINSUMER ventures to monetise collaborative filtering and profile matching in 2007, most likely by partnering with sites that are already centered around profiles, like MySpace and Bebo.com. Collaborative filtering and profile matching ranges from social shopping (check out Crowdstorm, ThisNext and Stylehive on Springwise) to the Last.fms and Yoonos of this world.
What else? As everything that becomes mass always paves the way for niche, expect more niche price comparison sites like Red Roller, which compares shipping prices for small businesses.
 And how about the long overdue rebirth of group buying? Back in 1999, Letsbuyit.com was too early, and spent too much money, but the potential of uniting like-minded buyers and demanding bulk discounts from retailers or manufacturers is still staggering.
What will make things easier this time around is that a) everybody is now online, and b) social software has taken care of the aggregation challenge. All this now needs is a CROWD CLOUT entrepreneur that will add a group-buying feature to existing networking sites.
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