GUESS AGAIN

It's never what you think it's going to be: that next big driver of bandwidth or that next surprising revenue generator. A whole industry popped up around vendors that were going to police peer-to peer music downloading, but by not generating revenue for anyone, that wasn't really the kind of next-big-thing the industry was looking for. It turns out that the digital camera, not the MP3 player, is driving bandwidth usage to the point where DSL and cable modem providers are opening the spigots on the upload side of their brand of broadband. Not only that, the industry's growing interest in digital imaging is winning converts and making money. Try Ofoto.com or one of the other photo-sharing Web sites for all those graduation and vacation pictures you took this summer. Not only will you get hooked on the concept, you'll be screaming at your broadband provider for a bigger upload pipe. What's more, you'll never again have to hear your frugal sister say, “Can you get doubles of those?” Now you can tell her to get them herself. Another bad call was that e-commerce and Web-based customer care would kill the cash cow called toll-free because more customer service would be conducted online. Not so, according to a recent Insight Research report that projected toll-free services revenue will grow from $10.9 billion in 2004 to almost $14.5 billion in 2009 — because of, and not despite, e-commerce. So don't throw away the old POTS and don't give up on that thing called voice because you never know. You can, however, junk that old Polaroid.