Besides the obvious, iTV, iPhone 5, iPad 3, what’s the next big market Apple will enter? Gaming. A bird might have hinted to me, Apple will build real consoles like Microsoft has for Xbox and Sony has done for Playstation.

A gaming console from Apple, iGame (if you will), makes perfect sense if you think about the model Apple uses, which is disrupting a large existing market with a way better product that anyone out there. They’ve done gaming for regular folks to enjoy on their iDevices, but now for the real gamers will come an actual gaming console where they can enjoy playing hours of Call of Duty, Madden or whatever else they please. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple integrated the iGame experience into their iTV. Imagine not having to buy a console, just popping games into your iTV, like you do DVD’s into your iMac, and kicking back for hours scoring three pointers.

An integrated gaming experience would surely give the iTV the “wow” factor no other tv has, but will definitely give the massive gamer market a damn good reason to actually take the dip and buy a new television set, despite all the other goodies of the iTV like a la carte subscription based programming.

But there’s more to it. I feel Apple will take gaming a step further, by possibly eliminating the need to buy physical discs. Just log into your iTunes, type a title, and click purchase- and download directly to your iTV. No scratched discs, no breaking them, no friends borrowing and never returning, no hassles. All you gamers out there, can you imagine getting the next title of your favorite game instantly, instead of having to wait in line and hope that you’ll be early enough in line to actually make the cut for limited quantity?

There’s no doubt the gaming market is a huge market and people don’t always give new gaming devices a chance, but gamers are usually geeks, and geeks usually use Apple products, and if Apple makes a gaming console- integrated into iTV or not- I feel they will be able to penetrate the market.

Apple just came off of a smoking hot quarter, but now everyone is thinking what the future holds for the technology juggernaut. There are talks about the obvious- iPhone 5 and iPad 3, then there are talks about new Macbooks, and lastly talks about Apple’s physical TV set or iTV as I like to think of it.

I’ve been meaning to comment on it for awhile now, but what better time to discuss the potential of iTV than now?

It’s obvious that Apple won’t just put out a tv set to say they have one and compete against the dominant players like Samsung and Sony in the space. Knowing the Apple we know, they’ll put out something truly unique and disruptive to say the least, to which all of our jaws will drop to the floor.

So what do I think the key features of iTV will be? Here’s what I think:

• iTunes will be integrated
• You will be able to download apps on it
• You will have an a la carte style of programming selection (more below)
• The tv itself will come with hard disk space (or flash memory) to record shows, which will eliminate the need for a separate DVR
• Ability to use your iPhone/iTouch/iPad for the remote

I’m sure there will be more features than I mentioned and while some of the listed features are probably obvious, the one thing I’m really betting Apple will introduce is a la carte programming.

For years, television programming has never changed. Either you have cable, satellite, or something free over the air. Now we have options like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon prime, etc- but those don’t count.

I have a feeling that Apple will introduce a way to subscribe to individual channels for individual subscription costs. Meaning if you want to watch ESPN, CNBC, and CNN for example, you pay for only those channels through iTunes or something connected to the iWorld. Americans pay a lot for cable or satellite and yet we only watch a small handful of the hundreds of channels we pay for. What a waste- it’s like buying dinner for 4 when all you are feeding is yourself. Why pay $40, $60, $100 or more per month for things you don’t even care for? Instead why not pay for individual subscriptions say $1.99, $2.99 or even $4.99 per month, depending on the channel? Imagine the subscriptions for a middle aged businessman versus a young high schooler versus a grandmother. The options are limitless.

I think Apple would have introduced the iTV by now, if they could get these content deals in place, but the major thing holding up the announcement of the iTV is probably structuring these deals. I’ve heard of reports saying they’ve been working on the iTV for multiple years and unless they’re making a tv set that projects a virtual hologram, I don’t think the technology would take them “years” to refine.

Just think about it for a minute, “cutting the cord,” all the hype in the media these days, but actually doing it with the sense that you are saving money and only paying for what you want. A nice clean bill for your favorite network of channels.

Think about the cash flow from something like this. Suits everything they’ve done in the past. Reoccurring revenue from iTunes after you buy an iPod, reoccurring revenue from the App store once you buy an iPad, a cut from all cellular plans once you buy a subsidized iPhone.

I made an interesting comment among my group of friends recently, stating my opinion of Apple being the first company ever that will reach a trillion dollar market cap. I guess we can start by taking Comcast’s and Time Warner’s and give Apple another $94B to pad that $414B as of writing this article. Maybe add a little Sony dollars in the mix. :)

Sounds like an Apple kind of thing to me. Of course, this is all my opinion and it’s not like I spoke to Steve Wozniak about it.

You have probably heard by now that Steve Jobs has passed. Firstly, I want to express my condolences to Steve’s family, friends and everyone at Apple and furthermore- everyone that loves technology.

As you can imagine, it was pretty sad hearing about it; news of his passing kind of felt surreal.

I want to take a minute and ask that you join me, to have a moment of silence in Steve’s memory.

He has shaped a lot of the technology many of us use today- whether they are Apple products or not- chances are a lot of the technology you use was influenced by Apple’s- mainly Steve’s innovations. One of the greatest minds in the world has left us.

Another hit out of Europe (Skype was from there) for sure, but more so one of the most relevant and useful tech companies of the past decade, Spotify, has all the buzz lately. And they deserve it. They’ve managed to create a radio meets iTunes client for online radio that everyone loves, myself included. There has always been different media players for consumers, but there hasn’t been one that lets you stream and listen to whatever song you want, for free in an iTunes like style, until Spotify.

I won’t rant on about how awesome Spotify is, instead, I’m making a bold statement and predicting that Google will acquire Spotify. Why? Well, there are many reasons and I will get to them, but my main thought is that Google will go head and head with iTunes, Google’s efforts combined with the boost of users Spotify already has, who have downloaded the desktop client, that will make them a big threat to Apple.

Aside from going head to head with Apple, there are other things that can benefit Google from acquiring Spotify, like their Google Music endeavors, a killer music experience for Android products and most interesting of all, tying Spotify in with Google+, particularly, the +points system.

I want to talk a little bit more about how Spotify is a huge threat to iTunes. If you think about it for a minute, iPod sales are on the downturn, that is mainly because people just use their Android or iPhone, as an mp3 player, that can do more than just play music. There is also a situation with the fact that each track generally costs $1.29 to buy on iTunes now, instead of $.99. In addition, people who buy more than 8 songs a month, are probably better off streaming the same music and more for $10/month with Spotify’s Premium plan. And the last point being that syncing will be irrelevant and people won’t need to deal with it if they stream their music, since their playlists are all available through one login on Spotify.

Now that we’ve established that Spotify is a threat, and a bigger threat to iTunes when Google acquires it, even though Spotify is not selling music and just streaming it, let me discuss why it will be a great move for Android.

Android is no doubt becoming more and more of a juggernaut, with 550,000 activations per day. But the Spotify experience seamlessly integrated with all Android phones and tablets? Now that’ll be a bigger scare for Apple. It’s kind of like Netflix, but 100x better because all of the new music available on iTunes is on Spotify, unlike Netflix where there is just junk for streaming (for the most part).

The combination of social (Google+) with a music streaming service like Spotify, will probably give Facebook a tough time. If Google makes all the playlists users have available in Google+, that would drive more people to be social for a longer amount of time, since their music is playing and it helps them waste more time through the day being non-productive (only kidding, but you know it’s true— how many people are on Facebook at work instead of actually working). The possibilities are endless, from people discussing their music to sharing, maybe even having a Google+ date with elegant music playing in the background (why not? It’s the digital age).

In fact, the whole acquisition could be expressed as an integration play. Integrate the Spotify service into every Android device natively. Integrate it into Google+. Plus it being on the desktop, would give Google a desktop presence and in turn they could integrate Google+ into Spotify’s desktop client, allowing users to surf their Google+ service on the client itself.

Obviously acquiring Spotify wouldn’t be cheap for Google, given Spotify’s raised about $150M and about 33.2M Euros, but with Google revenues around $9B for quarter 2/2011, it doesn’t seem that difficult.

Now there is a reason I didn’t predict Microsoft or Facebook would acquire Spotify for two reasons.

First, Microsoft wouldn’t acquire them because they are still probably working on integration of Skype, but more so because they are focused on other things like trying to eat Google’s lunch, with Bing and trying to 1 up Apple OS X with Windows 8.

Facebook simply does not have the cash to acquire a service like Spotify since it is not public, and while I’m sure they would throw in a bid during an auction, they won’t be the highest bidder, that said, you never know if Microsoft will pull another Skype and outbid Facebook and Google and just pick up Spotify so their competitors can’t have it. But if we start thinking like that Apple has been sitting on a pile of cash for years and hasn’t made many acquisitions and Spotify would assure their stability in the ecosystem for a little while, but I’m sure in that case the anti-trust brigade would come knocking.

People might say they’d still rather download music because of data caps on their cellular carriers data plans, etc, but the fact is that WiFi is available in many places than not, so that doesn’t seem like a big issue, more so because if you download more than 50 songs a month, it is still cheaper to pay for Spotify Premium, additional bandwidth for data on some carriers and still come out ahead. And if you can use Google Rewards like +points for a service like Spotify, I don’t see it doing anything but destroying Apple’s iTunes business. All in all I believe Apple has done a great thing and made everything digital for the world, but Google will make it’s move and it will be staggering.

P.S. It is good to note that Google has had discussions with Spotify in the past, offering $1B to acquire the company, but the issue was that the contracts Spotify has with the major music labels, would be renegotiated if the service is acquired, which throws a curveball for whoever is acquiring the service. So why will Google circle back in the future? Because Spotify will be able to grow under its current conditions to desktops (and mobile devices) around the world, and once there is a surety of number of users, the risk will be less, even if the service ends up costing the acquirer more money.