The year ahead for ... digital.

Jean-Paul Edwards on why 2009 - a year many view with trepidation - will be one in which digital continues to flourish.

On Christmas Day, 1990, we all received a gift. We didn't know it at the time and it wasn't addressed to any of us. On that day, a packet of information was sent over the internet using a set of protocols that would soon be known as the worldwide web. That experiment evolved into what has arguably become the largest force of change in the communications industry.

Today, the 1s and 0s of digital media are fast becoming the new lingua franca of communications. A popular T-shirt among geeks proudly proclaims that there are 10 types of people in the world. Those that understand binary, and those that do not. In that spirit, here are 1001 digital predictions and themes for the new year.

Continued growth. The wider economic environment will, of course, have some impact on the digital industry, but as advertisers increase their focus on return on investment as well as innovation, digital will continue to grow as both a response medium and a brand medium. As consumers become ever more price-conscious, shopping online becomes more attractive. We are already spending 17p in every pounds 1 online (IMRG 2008) and this will grow in 2009.

Small devices doing amazing things. The new consumer products of 2009 are the product of investment decisions made several years ago at the height of the recent boom. The volume of mobile devices is staggering: already there are more than four billion devices and, early in 2009, mobile devices will be owned by half of the world's population. New mobile devices running Google's Android operating system and many more iPhones will spur further innovation. Applications empowered by the web will radically change our view of the potential of these clever little gadgets. Also, the developing cloud of computing technologies will massively empower mobile, as much of the hard work is done on the web rather than on the device.

TV and the web make friends. Despite recent problems, Project Kangaroo should launch to great excitement, whatever it ends up being called. It will look a lot more like broadcast TV than we have been used to from an online service, and it will herald a period of accelerated change for TV. Hulu has been an enormous success in the US, especially as it is built around web business models. They happily link to competitors' content, making them the starting point for a TV experience, and they positively encourage users to 'steal' small portions of shows, making them naturally viral/social. Teenagers already know all about this, and the rest of us will discover the joys of an on-demand social TV experience; in the long run, TV will be far better off for it.

Games as top dog. Video games are rapidly becoming the largest entertainment format in the world - it is a bigger industry than the box office or music industry. The new generation of consoles will break ten million sales in the UK in 2009 and most of them will be online. Like last year, a game will be the biggest money-spinner in consumer entertainment and ever more brands will want to be associated with these new cultural forces.