If you are reading this publication, chances are you love gadgets. Let's face it, we all love technology, and if we could do nothing but track the latest gadgets, we probably would.

Now more than ever though, there's a hidden message in gadget mania, and it has to do with your telephone company, its future offerings and your IT environment. Consumer-goods manufacturers are in a rush to network-enable everything under the sun. With that network-enablement comes a host of new services, gadgets and trends that will undoubtedly affect businesses.

With telecom innovation in a slump and pressure on service providers to deploy new revenue-generating services with a quick return on investment, there's not much new happening on the services front. New launches are being scaled back, and regulation again holds the key to whether it all gets jump-started again.

But the consumer space is booming. Nowhere is this more pronounced than at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held recently in Las Vegas. As experience with PDAs and other consumer goods has shown (note I called PDAs a consumer device), employees will adopt what they think will make them more efficient and life more fun, and leave it for IT managers to figure out later what to do.

So what happens when your employees can surf onto the corporate intranet from their TV set? At CES, Prismiq showed off a best-of-show $250 wireless-supported device for doing instant messaging and Web browsing on the TV, in addition to consumer favorites such as playing MP3s and videos - all via a link to your computer, which can be rooms away. Heard it before with WebTV? Sure, but it's getting better and better, and now with wireless links between computers (and the broadband connection) and the entertainment center, a whole new realm of revenue opportunities for service providers comes in.

How many times have people said, "No one wants to watch a movie on their computer?" A lot. Despite that, DVD drives for laptops are now almost standard issue. But getting that DVD to the TV has been constrained by a huge divide between the computing and entertainment domains in the home. With the advent of new standards such as the UPnP media server specifications, transport layers are in place for getting content off the PC and onto the TV.