Come Saturday mornings and one of my first ports of call is Bob Cringely’s column over at PBS.org. This week he makes his communications predictions for 2007.

When you look at how close he came last year (despite getting only 60pc absolutely correct), you’ll be forced to take this new batch seriously.

Three out of the 15 caught my sparrowhawk eye.

10) The year the net crashed (in the USA). Video overwhelms the net and we all learn that the broadband ISPs have been selling us something they can’t really deliver.

This follows on from some highly technical discussions he posted last year on various aspects of bandwidth and internet provision across the U.S. All that bit haulage stuff is way above my knowledge-basin, so I’ll just comment that it sounded pretty plausible to me, as does this. Video is clearly getting out of hand, with BitTorrent taking 30pc of current bandwidth, mostly for anything but HD viewing. This must explode at some point, and 2007 is as good a guess as any.

13) Sand Hill Road [VC-land in Silicon Valley] goes into a panic when it becomes clear that there is more money available than good opportunities for investing it, shades of 1999. No bubble this time, though, because the reasons behind the effect are different — there is a decided lack of IPO activity — but VCs will still be excessively crashing their MacLaren F1s as they see their era fading.

Well, at least they don’t drive Ferraris — British F1s are always preferable and much more James Bond. Back to the point : so Cringe expects a series of selective crashes rather than one Big Bang, like in 2000/1.

You’ve got to go with that given that entrepreneurs are oh so careful nowadays, many bootstrapping their businesses with clever cash-flow techniques, or using Angel finance. Our very own Syntagma Media has avoided the debt-trap like the pox. And while venture capital is nominally money-debt free, there’s still a debt of expectation clinging to the exit strategy.

But an excess of money has a simpler solution than just backing anything that grunts. They could always return the money to their investors and drive vintage Cadillacs instead of MacLarens. But that would destroy the complex infrastructure of sandcastles that VCs build to define their businesses.

The best prediction is left not only till last, but left dangling on a precipice.

15) Google’s Grand Plan is finally revealed, explaining all. Hey, wait, that’s next week’s column!

Apocalypse Now — or rather, next week. This will be all about shadowy shipping-container datacenters, personalized IP-TV advertising, and the buying up of all that hidden dark fiber in the bowels of the earth.

It could be a Dan Brown novel. Maybe Cringely is his agent!