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.

You’ve probably heard by now that Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5 billion. Most people think that Microsoft overpaid for Skype, and quite frankly it is irrelevant. Microsoft wanted to “guarantee” their acquisition of Skype (didn’t want to risk Google ousting them on the deal), and a couple bucks more doesn’t really matter if they have a solid plan on how they can take advantage of the acquisition and make billions more.

The first thing that comes to my mind in terms of Skype playing a strategical role in the future success of Microsoft is a FaceTime type competitor for Windows 7 Phones. If Microsoft can market the Skype technology (with some new features/innovation) being native on Windows phones, they can possibly recapture some of the lost market share in their benefit. Since Skype is already used by many millions, when marketing it, it wouldn’t be difficult for people to understand whatever they try to throw at consumers.

Of course there is Skype available as apps on Android and iPhone’s, but like I said, Microsoft will need to add on “special” functionality for Windows 7 Phones to one up the other two. And since they own Skype now, nobody is stopping them from doing so.

I also think Microsoft will tie in Skype with Xbox. This would be another somewhat obvious play on their part, but they could possibly make the gaming experience a lot better if it included live video streams of sorts, or maybe even virtual reality. Xbox already has Xbox live, so it could be a natural fit for that, however, there are also many problems with putting live video streams of people playing video games on another strangers tv. Seen the movie Gamer? Imagine if something like that was implemented in Xbox in the future. (Ok, maybe not that extreme, but perhaps along those lines).

More realistically, they could come out with some Xbox implementation to make the counsel more appealing as a set top box. The market of set top boxes is a thing a lot of companies are trying to get into and succeed at (Google, Boxee, etc.), but nobody has really nailed it yet. Throw in some Xbox kinect, with a little Skype, and some games, and it might be worth buying for trendy households.

It could turn out that Microsoft does something extremely out of the blue, like partner with major television manufactures and implement some kind of webcam in all new televisions. In fact, with the whole smart tv phenomenon, this wouldn’t seem far fetched. Skype would turn into a living room thing, with families, instead of just computer to computer or mobile. Microsoft has the abilities to land these deals and this would be a major stepping stone for Skype’s future. Grandparents wanting to see the whole family across the country before the nine o’ clock news? Done. 

In the end Skype has millions of users, and if you add millions of users with the right creativity, the outcome might be something very profitable. If all the cards fall in the right place, the $8.5 billion Microsoft paid for Skype will seem like a drop in the bucket.