Although written for a European audience, we found a recent CNBC Business Report entitled “Top Ten Tech Trends” very much applicable to the United States as well, if not for the whole modern world.

And that’s not just because it’s based in large part on American technology giants like Microsoft, Intel and Google. It’s also because Europe has shown itself adept at applying innovations on a large scale in a way that often wins enthusiastic response from the consumer and business markets.

CNBC’s Tony Glover is confident that several of the new innovations we’ve seen lately are just the beginning of larger trends that will revolutionize the telecom and IT industries over the next few years. Looking at some of the examples he sites, it’s hard to argue with his conclusions.

Best of all, he feels that these consumer tech breakthroughs will result in “unprecedented opportunities for small and medium-sized players” — great news for small business owners looking for new ways to compete with the big guys.

The basis for his review is the big 3GSM Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, the world’s largest exhibition for the mobile technology industry. The GSM is a worldwide mobile communications network that originated in Europe and is now used by over two billion people in 212 countries, according to the article.

Once again Bill Gates and Steve Jobs will be going toe-to-toe to decide who will dominate the next generation of computing. But the fact that the US computing industry’s major battleground in 2007 will be high-end wireless handhelds is testimony to the global success of the GSM network, the European Commission’s mobile communications standard. The number of people using GSM has mushroomed from around one million in 1993 to over two billion today, operating across 212 countries.

And the top ten trends are:

1. If there is one trend that will dominate in 2007, it is the globalisation of mobile communications. The mobile phone industry estimates that around 1.3 billion mobile phones will be sold in 2007, with the rapidly developing economies of India and China being the main engines for growth. Mobile operators in India, for example, are signing new mobile phone owners at the staggering rate of about a million a week. …

2. The second trend … is the way in which mobile communications are becoming more sophisticated and relying less on basic voice services. Mobile operator O2, owned by Spain’s Telefonica, predicts that all phones will be email-enabled by 2010. This will effectively leapfrog consumers in markets like India and China from the 19th to the 21st century. They will be able to move from being without a phone or PC straight to the world of always-connected email and internet services simply by signing up for a mobile phone. Way before this happens, devices such as Apple’s new iPhone will have introduced users to high-definition mobile audio and video. Electronic gaming, music and even TV programmes will become available to millions almost overnight. …

3. The third major trend … is the continued convergence of IT and telecoms. Not only will mobile phones behave increasingly like computers, but telecoms operators … will also use their broadband services to supply services such as internet TV (IPTV) to customers. … BT (British Telecom) has recently struck a string of deals with content providers including Universal Music and Time Warner in order to be able to provide an ever-wider choice of on-demand entertainment. …

4. The fourth trend will see the rise of increasingly sophisticated forms of internet-based advertising as IPTV takes off. Microsoft is now determined to take Google’s ball away and run with it. It has, for instance, developed its own form of Google-style paid-for search that uses Microsoft’s vast database of personal information to allow advertisers to target specific demographic groups.

“Advertisers can see the age and sex of web surfers clicking on their ads as a result of information gathered by Microsoft properties such as MSN Hotmail, which requires those registering to submit their age bracket and gender,” says James Colborn, product manager at Microsoft’s adCenter research labs. He adds that advertisers do not have access to the names of those visiting their sites, merely a demographic overview of their age and sex.

According to Colborn, the adCenter labs on the Microsoft campus outside Seattle are about to release even more precise online advertising tools. Microsoft is launching a trial IPTV advertising service with an as-yet-unnamed major US retailer that will make a technological prediction made by Bill Gates last year a reality. …

5. The fifth major trend [is] the way in which all consumer IT devices, mobile and fixed, will become content guzzlers. The competition to acquire quality content will become intense, but ironically, the very technology providing consumers with the ability to access such a wide range of content will also make it increasingly difficult for major content owners to derive any revenue from their products.

6. This is a result of the sixth trend, which will be the proliferation of free services. The early years of the internet trained users to expect internet-based services to be largely free, and this has become a well-established trend. It will benefit small and nimble players with low overheads offering the kind of services capable of generating advertising.

Traditional entertainment giants like the Hollywood film studios will become increasingly vulnerable. Having been weaned on free music download sites such as Kazaa, many younger consumers now see nothing inherently wrong in using file-swapping services based outside the US to download copyrighted film and TV content for free.

7. The seventh trend will be the growing familiarity of the letters DRM – short for digital rights management – as traditional content providers such as the major Hollywood studios fight tooth and nail to protect their investments. New US laws designed to give long prison sentences to movie pirates are just the start.

8. The eighth trend [is] mobile operators such as Vodafone finally starting to accept that consumers will never use their handsets to access high-priced data services in the way these companies anticipated when they started to build their 3G networks at an estimated cost of €200bn. Instead, these operators will turn to business customers. Companies like Vodafone are already seeing business revenues rise as corporate users install 3G cards on their laptops.

9. This move to increased business mobility will be accelerated by trend number nine, as new types of mobile device from companies like Intel bridge the gap between mobile phones and laptops. Ultra-mobile laptops are shrinking, as evidenced by OQO’s Vista handheld computer. The key element to this trend is that the computing industry will finally abandon its one-size-fits-all philosophy. This will offer new opportunities for small and nimble companies to deploy mobile workforces and save money on the cost of centralised offices.

According to Intel, this revolution in portable computing will not merely be a question of physical dimensions. Portable computers will also be manufactured for specific environments such as schools and hospitals.

10. The tenth trend will be an extension of this kind of dedicated computing as machine-to-machine wireless communication becomes increasingly important. Machines ranging from in-car computers to heart monitors and other medical devices will be able to communicate with one another. It is estimated that by 2011 there will be over 100 million wirelessly connected devices.

Check out the original article in its entirety here.