This post is part of our Hottest Products of 2007 feature. Also check out our other Hottest Products of 2007 posts and let us know which product you think is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

The '00s have become the decade of convergence and convenience. No longer will we tolerate being off-line, out of telephone contact, or more than an inch away from entertainment. One of this year's most striking C&C devices is the Slingbox.

Sling Media's device will take your cable television, satellite or DVR output and convert it into a signal that can be received by your computer's wireless card, allowing you to watch your shows on your PC wherever you may be, in the range of your wireless network. At last, I can lounge by my (imaginary) pool drinking my (imaginary) Cuba Libre and still watch the Browns trounce Pittsburgh (imaginary).

Even better (i.e., worse, if you are a broadcaster), the signal could be routed via the internet to my PC anywhere in the world. The company also offers a product that will route the signal to your cell phone.

Although Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is about to release its AppleTV product that it hopes will bridge the divide among the PC and the living room entertainment center, how far has the consumer electronics world come in this arena?

There have been numerous attempts to actually make the TV and PC one device -- or at least a nice ecosystem -- but have any caught on with consumers? Not a one, although there are arguments that some devices have made "inroads."

I say, to where? Only one person I know of has a complete bridge between his TV and home entertainment system and the content of his PC as well as a live pipe to the Internet from the television/main living room.

Is it more inflammatory in a headline to say, "death to Google" than "death to AOL" or "death to Yahoo!"? That seems to be what everyone's going with, today.

Because today is the day that everyone's reviewing the keynote speech of longtime cable exec Leo Hindery, at the Convergence 2.0 conference yesterday. Hindery (representing the "Washington Insider" viewpoint but, seemingly, attacking his subject matter in an Infrastructure-is-King Insider kind of way) represented the media universe as consisting of three pillars:

• Content (ABC, NBC, Disney, Time Warner's content side?),
• Portals (Google, Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, and eBay) and
• "Non-Broadcast Distributors" (notably, cable and the satellites)

He put numbers to everything, so I can make fun of it more easily. Portals have a collective market cap of $225 billion, he says. Advertising represents two-thirds of this, or about $150 billion. But as the content that makes up the backbone of these portals is non-proprietary, it will be easy for the content providers to steal that money away.

Hence, death to Google. And three of the other four (I haven't found where he said which of the content providers would survive).