This year, the technology industry will finally deliver on all the promises it made to change the world at the height of the dotcom boom. Businesspeople across Europe will finally video-conference as easily as they make telephone calls and iPods will be seen as serious professional tools. In the home, huge flat video screens on living-room walls will access vast web-based movie and video libraries for every film ever made, every song ever recorded.

Two parallel trends are set to converge in 2007. Technologies such as internet TV will turn the entertainment and consumer electronics markets upside down. At the same time, consumer-oriented technologies will take the business world by storm. This year too, the European Union will also begin to address the dark side of the technological revolution. RFID tagging of people as well as shop goods, biometric identity cards and smart digital surveillance cameras, plus Europe's ever-expanding DNA database of known and suspected criminals, will all spark a massive continent-wide debate on civil liberties.

Most of the gadgets promised us at the height of the dotcom boom were perfectly feasible; many were actually produced. But the networks needed to support them were not yet ready. Wireless internet (Wi-Fi) lay years in the future and dial-up, fixed-line internet connections were painfully slow. In Europe, internet penetration lagged years behind the US, although mobile voice communications on this side of the Atlantic were far in advance owing to the ubiquity of Europe's GSM standard.

 But the rollout of broadband that began last year is now gathering a momentum that will have a very real effect in 2007 with the arrival of internet TV. Operators like BT and internet service providers such as Tiscali will this year have so-called 'soft' launches of internet TV services that will be mass-marketed to consumers next year. The operators will also face competition from companies including Microsoft, which will use technologies such as its Media Center software and its Xbox console, a games console that also happens to able to download movies.

On the business front, Cisco has already launched a teleconference service that it believes will transform business communications in 2007. This delivers the real-time synchronisation, picture and video quality that video conferencing constantly promised but never really delivered. Picture quality is roughly twice as good as that of today's high-definition TVs. Cisco has also solved the problem of people on video conferences appearing to stare over one another's shoulders. The camera placement allows participants to apparently look one another in the eyes.

The increased use of video in business will also lead to the increased use of devices and services more usually associated with leisure. Apple, for example, reports that iPods are increasingly being used as business tools as well as music and video players. Companies are using the devices for training purposes. The pocket-sized video and audio players, with their vast memories, can, for example, be used to provide language courses. Siemens Medical Solutions, based in Germany and the US, bought iPods for staff in its molecular imaging group, reducing the number of costly training courses that employees needed to attend.

When the mobile telecoms industry holds its big annual event, the 3GSM World Conference 2007, in Barcelona in February, it will reflect the gradual remorseless shift of mobile communications away from consumers to business users. Ever since paying around €100bn for 3G licences, the mobile telecoms operators have been in denial regarding the sums consumers would be willing to pay for mobile phone services. Despite hard statistical evidence that people were, at the most, prepared to forgo a visit to the hairdressers to pay for mobile communications, the main European operators have been hoping that consumers would suddenly see the light and start shelling out hundreds of euros a month for all kinds of content on their mobile. These dreams still motivate some of the operator strategies, such as the recent foray into mobile TV, but in 2007, harsh commercial realities will force the operators to start offering business users reliable, high-speed synchronised fixed and mobile communications.

The 3G networks will be used to carry business data across Europe. Operators such as T-Mobile have developed 3G terminals designed to offer small businesses maximum flexibility. All that will be needed to provide high-speed wireless internet access across an entire office floor will be to plug in a single 3G box to the electric power socket. At the same time, Vodafone is also signing deals with major laptop makers to install 3G antennae inside new laptops. The year 2007 will mark the true arrival of the wireless office.

The 57,000 visitors to the congress in Barcelona will also see a new range of phones designed for business users, which will challenge the supremacy of the Research in Motion range of hand-held BlackBerry email devices. Despite being essentially business devices, some of these devices may have additional entertainment features such as gaming or MP3 music players.

As the year progresses, the line will start to blur even more between what are seen as business tools and entertainment services. Reuters, for example, is currently trialling 'Project Mars', the codename for a MySpace-style social networking site tailored to the financial services industry. It will enable firms to communicate with one another over the internet in a similar way to that in which global teenagers use MySpace to develop an online identity and interact with one another. But instead of discussing the latest rock bands or the latest teen party, Reuters believes that Europe's financial services companies will want to use the technology to improve real-time communications with clients.

According to Dave Gurlé who leads Reuters Messaging product development team, the technology used by social networking sites like MySpace is ideal for functions such as sharing analysts' reports with customers. "We were inspired by what we had seen in the consumer environment in terms of social networking and instant messaging and decided to offer our own version of MySpace. We fine-tuned the technology for commercial use by adding features such as encryption security and identity management," says Gurlé.

All these gizmos are ready to run this year, but as was made painfully clear by the failure of 3G, only the customer – be they consumer or business – can determine the success of any technology. Don't be surprised to see more bitter tears shed over new platforms that excite the boffins but leave the public cold.

The issues in this piece will be examined in greater depth in the March issue of CNBC European Business, which follows the mobile multimedia industry's 3GSM conference in Barcelona