We all know what the alleged future of music will look like. The record industry will be reduced to a smouldering ruin, the album replaced by endless individual songs and music rendered pretty much worthless by the fact that it’s universally free.

Empty record shops will be overrun with weeds and old CDs will be used as coasters.

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I’m not entirely sure that Chis DeWolfe enjoyed our encounter at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The affable American, co-founder and chief executive of MySpace, was jet-lagged, having stepped off a flight from Los Angeles that morning into a punishing schedule of interviews and the launch of a new mobile offering. Then I arrived to interview him for radio–and to point a video camera at him for this blog.

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Computer security professionals say many net forums are populated by teenagers swapping credit card numbers, phishing kits and hacking tips.

The poor technical skills of many young hackers means they are very likely to get caught and arrested, they say.

Youth workers added that teenagers getting a criminal record would be putting their future at risk.

“I see kids of 11 and 12 sharing credit card details and asking for hacks,” said Chris Boyd, director of malware research at FaceTime Security.

Many teenagers got into low-level crime by looking for exploits and cracks for their favorite computer games.

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My friend Simon is one of those net entrepreneurs with the attention to detail it takes to have an idea and turn it into an effective company. He’s currently on his second job-search service, and it seems to be going very well.

One reason for the success may be that Simon has embraced the network age with a dedication that most of us can only wonder at. He uses a range of productivity tools, scheduling services and collaborative systems to manage both his personal and professional life, and once confessed to me that he had “outsourced his memory” to Microsoft Outlook and its calendar service.

Recently I’ve noticed that Simon’s head is in the cloud. Or rather, his business is, as he and his team have moved most of their systems online, taking advantage of the move from local storage and processing to cloud computing, where data and services are provided online and accessed from a PC or any other device.

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Remember the term “water cooler moment”–in which a TV show generated a social buzz and was talked about by colleagues at work after broadcast? It seems to me that there are fewer and fewer water cooler moments, in part because television has become less of a cohesively social experience.

PVRS, video on demand, BitTorrent, digital download stores, DVD box sets have all helped to fracture the common viewing experience. We tend to watch our TV content out of sync with one another these days.

But last night I experienced a water cooler moment as a program was being broadcast. It was social TV at the point of broadcast, and it was thanks to Twitter.

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Microsoft has joined forces with the developers of the “$100 laptop” to make Windows available on the machines. The move was prompted by countries that demanded the operating system before placing an order.

Trials of laptops loaded with Windows will begin in “four to five” countries from June, the organizations said. The founder of One Laptop Per Child, which developed the machines, denied the move was a “desperate new measure” to secure more orders.

“While it is certainly true that it has not taken off as fast as I would have hoped and publicly stated, certain countries around the world… have always been very, very insistent that they want Windows as an option,” Nicholas Negroponte told BBC News.

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It’s easy to forget that as well as being an extraordinarily innovative firm, Google is also rapidly becoming Britain’s biggest advertising business. The latest figures–released on Thursday evening–show how rapidly it is growing in the U.K., earning $803 million (about £407m) in the first three months of 2008, about 40% up on a year ago. Let’s put that into context. Last year, ITV’s net advertising revenue was £1.5 billion. So, even if you just multiply Google’s earnings by four and assume no further growth this year, Britain’s biggest commercial television business–the original “license to print money”–is about to be overtaken by an American upstart which only arrived in the U.K. in 2001.

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