The five innovations were selected based on projects from IBM's Research labs, research conducted by IBM's business staff, and ideas from more than 150,000 people in 104 countries, including IBM employees, their family members, universities, business partners and customers from 67 countries.  According to IBM, the Next Five in Five will change the way people live, interact with doctors, or even communicate with others though they speak different languages.

Mobile phones to read your mind

Advanced-presence technology will give mobile phones and PDAs the ability to automatically learn about their users' whereabouts and preferences as they commute, work and travel. The presence technology used in instant messaging allows people to locate and identify their friends as soon as they connect to the network, but in five years, all sorts of mobile devices will have the ability to continually learn about and adapt to people's preferences and needs. Your phone will know when you're in class or in a meeting and automatically divert to voicemail. Your favourite pizza joint will know when you're on your way home after a late night and ping you with a special-price, take-home meal just for you.

Technologies to address environmental problems

Governments and companies are increasingly looking to improve environmental stewardship and working to secure reliable and cost-effective resources like water and energy. Information technology, materials science, and physics will help meet environmental needs. Nanotechnology - the ability to manipulate individual atoms and molecules to form tiny new structures - has already had a major impact on microprocessors, making electronic products like PCs and mobile phones smaller, better and cheaper. In coming years, nanotechnology will likely be used for water filtration. This could advance ecology and conservation, helping to address the growing worldwide shortage of water supplies. Other areas where IT, physics, and material science will have a big impact are advanced water modelling and improving solar power systems.

3-D Internet

The popular online immersive destinations, such as Second Life and the World of Warcraft, will evolve into the 3-D Internet, much like the way the early work of the likes of Darpa, AOL and Prodigy evolved into the World Wide Web. In this immersive online world, people will walk the aisles of supermarkets, bookstores and DVD shops, where they will encounter experts you'd rarely find in your local store. The 3-D Internet will enable new kinds of education, remote medicine and consumer experiences, transforming how we interact with our friends, family, doctors, teachers, favourite stores and more.

Remote healthcare

Millions of people with chronic health problems such as diabetes, heart, kidney or circulatory problems will be able to have their conditions automatically monitored as they go about their daily lives.

Device makers and healthcare professionals will take a proactive approach to ongoing, remote monitoring of patients, delivered through sensors in the home, worn on the person, or in devices and packaging.

These advances will also allow patients to better monitor their own health and help clinicians provide on-going preventive care, regardless of a person's location.

Hardware and software advances in the field of remote-control healthcare will be a major source of consumer and enterprise innovation by 2012.

Real-time speech translation

The movement towards globalisation needs to take into account basic human elements, such as differences in language.

For example, IBM speech innovations are already allowing media companies to monitor Chinese and Arabic news broadcasts over the Web in English, travellers using PDAs to translate menus in Japanese, and doctors to communicate with patients in Spanish.

Real-time translation technologies and services will be embedded into mobile phones, handheld devices and cars.

These services will pervade every part of business and society, eliminating the language barrier in the global economy and social interaction.