Martin Veitch

One of the first signs that we are in the bleak midwinter is that journalists and PRs about to hibernate in the nearest pub for a couple of weeks publish a list highlighting stuff that happened in the year nearly over or stuff that will happen in the year about to start. Actually, make that might happen.

So I'm predicting you won't be surprised to see yet another set of predictions for 2009; but wait, what we've done here is a bit more clever. Rather than just write our own list (and we will do that too, I predict) we've put together a poll of polls from our mailbox to come up with something with a patina of scientific research. So without further ado, here is the CIO Predictions List of Lists.

Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang has devised a "health check" to establish whether your corporate blog has the right stuff -- the only problem being that you don't have a corporate blog. Probably. No, almost certainly.

Owyang's checklist is worth reading if you do, however, and it vicariously points out what's missing from most corporate blogs -- that is, trust. But the elephant on the table is the absence of industry leaders prepared to discuss in open forum what's really going on inside their heads.

Next Tuesday, the computer mouse turns 40 and, like many of us who reach that totemic and solemn age, the unappreciated little fellow next to your keyboard will doubtless take the opportunity to reflect on some ups and downs, roads not taken, bridges burned and opportunities scorned. But he'll also doubtless also raise a glass and say "Well, at least I'm still around."

On 9 December, 1968, Hugo Montenegro's theme from The Good, The Bad And The Ugly topped the US charts. Perhaps Doug Engelbart heard it as he drove towards a convention centre in San Francisco to give a presentation to show 1000 attendees the first demonstration of the mouse. Looking a little like a presenter of The Twilight Zone, he showed how a mouse could be used to control a cursor (but referred to by Engelbart and cohorts as a bug) to move around blocks of text. The mouse was patented but the patent terms ran out in 1987, according to Wikipedia, just a few years before it became an essential part of the personal computing world.

It was in line with the likelihood of summer following spring that somebody would declare an application optimized for Google's Chrome, the new web browser that has dominated the geekier end of technology news this week. And it turns out that that somebody is the rising star of the software-as-a-service movement, NetSuite.

Of course, one of the attractions of Chrome is that most Web sites render well, despite not having been written with the browser in mind. But NetSuite has gone a step further, tweaking its hosted business applications for CRM, e-commerce, accounting and services automation to take advantage of Chrome's fast handling of Ajax elements such as type-ahead lookups (where search terms are automatically completed) and list editing. The aim of NetSuite (and that of Google too) will be to make the feel of applications generally more responsive.