Tony Perkins whooping it up last night…. (CNET recap, paddle vote summary, and video segment)
Here are the tends we debated, with one trend from each speaker, interspersed with five crowdsourced trends (as measured by funding, IP, and press mentions) – that the “wisdom of the crowds” suggests as the most important. At the end, Tony Perkins and Jason Pontin contribute their own bonus trends that they actually believe in.
1) Joe Schoendorf: The Millennials Are Here. Everything is changing. Rapidly!
This month will be the first college graduating class whose members do not recall life off line. For openers, they do not read newspapers. This group will drive the greatest wave of disruption ever witnessed
2) Crowd: Advanced batteries will be the most popular alternative energy investment in ‘09 and ’10 – and in the medium term will provide the best returns.
3) Ann Winblad: The unstructured data deluge creates the next great information leaders. Every click, message, tweet is rich data amassed at exponential rates. Gartner predicts enterprise data growth of 650 percent in five years; 80 percent of that data will be unstructured.
4) Crowd: Wireless broadband will be one of the only IT sectors to see increased funding this year and in the near future – fueled by demand for faster, better networking, but also by government subsidies.
5) Vinod Khosla: “Maintech” not “Cleantech”: Capitalism based increasing carbon efficiency of global GDP. Carbon emissions per $/GDP are driven down by technology, creating massive new opportunities and disrupting traditional energy/infrastructure; innovations in lighting, engines, appliances, water, plastics, cement, glass and steel help fossilize our fossil fuel reliance.
6) Crowd: Power and efficiency management services will see a flowering of investment and innovation, as we realize we cannot have an alternative energy future without a smarter infrastructure. Again, government handouts don’t hurt either
7) Steve Jurvetson: The triumph of the distributed web. Innovation advances at the edge, not in the warm data center. The aggregate power of widely distributed human activity will trump the centralized content, telecom and search businesses of the past.
8) Crowd: Healthcare administration software will the fastest growing sector of B2B software in ‘09 and ‘10, driven by our national imperative to reign in escalating healthcare costs
9) Ram Shriram: Consumption of digital goods on mobile devices is THE growth story of the coming decade. There are presently four times as many mobile subscribers as there are PCs in use worldwide. Emerging markets comprise the majority of the world’s mobile users, and are not only the fastest-growing, but also show the largest interest in data services over mobile devices. Greater availability of broadband wireless will spur the adoption of many new and existing applications: email, voice, personal productivity, micro-blogging, games, entertainment/video, transactions, micro-payments, camera/image apps, location-based apps and many more.
10) Crowd: Electronic displays will prove the hottest investment in hardware this year and the next, as startups compete to create the thin, flexible, colorful screens of the future.
Tony Perkins and Jason Pontin BONUS TRENDS
11) DC will prove to be a poor VC. Venture-backed companies/industries will continue to be the largest contributors to job and wealth creation in the US — the Federal government’s attempts to fund new technologies will pale in comparison in terms of long-term ROI, and in many instances will have negative impact.
12) The rumors of the demise of the reporter have been exaggerated
Print newspapers and magazines will continue to shutter or be radically downsized — but the work by a new class of well trained and talented reporters will emerge online, and the reading public will embrace their work after becoming weary of editorialists and bloggers who spew their opinion with little regard to quality research and fact checking.
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