Top 10 Tech Trends for 2010


Image by jurvetson
With real time voting by all audience members, just to add to the stress. =)

Each of us had to come up with two tech trends to watch for the next year. Here is what we debated:

Steve Jurvetson:
1) It’s a wonderful time to start a company. In retrospect, 2010 will be a great entrepreneurial vintage with exceptional fruit from low-yielding vineyards.

Good omens include: global markets of record scale, an influx of human talent, a recurring long-wave-cycle of venture economics, and compounding disruptive innovation. Scientists do not slow down for recessions. The pace of innovation, as epitomized by Moore’s Law, is accelerating and is exogenous to the economy. Healthier company cultures are formed during down markets, with a frugal focus on customer feedback, rather than investors, or competitors. Most of the DJIA are companies founded during a recession. (edit: this video is now online here)

2) Code comes alive. History will highlight 2010 as the year of the first synthetic life — a watershed accomplishment in “Biotech 2.0” and the next epoch of evolution.

With 100% of the DNA assembled from beakers of chemicals, synthetic microbes will boot up as living, self-replicating cells. Heralding an era of intelligent design in biology, one composes the digital genome on a computer, writing software that creates its own hardware. Instead of slowly splicing physical genes, scientists will create billions of genetically novel microbes per day. Early applications will recycle waste into fuels, chemicals and clean water. (edit: a video clip of this one went online)

David Weiden:
1. Wearable computers and the next hundred billion connected devices
Breakthroughs in power management and manufacturing, combined with a steady shift to cloud services and increasingly pervasive wireless Internet connections form the catalysts for new classes of devices and Internet services. Many expect connected devices to be more than an order of magnitude greater than the number of phones with the next decade or two. Will there be an Apple of wearable computers? Of connected medical devices? Inside or outside your body? Opportunities for new category defining companies abound. But beware of silicon cockroaches.

2. The Internet finds a new patient: healthcare
A .7 trillion dollar industry in the US alone. The 2010 healthcare reform bill will introduce 30 million new patients, no new doctors, less money available per patient. The government has signed up to pay over ,000 per doctor who moves to electronic medical records. Oracle recently turned their acquisition sites in this direction with the 0M acquisition of Phase Forward. Huge market, under stress, financial incentives, increasing M&A activity … is it time for Internet innovation to increase focus here?

Kevin Efrusy:
1. Social Web as Substrate for New Category Killers
Every major media shift (Radio to TV, TV to Web Portals, Web Portals to Search, Search to Social) gives rise to a set of brand new fast-growing companies who are the first to recognize and fully exploit the transition. Yahoo! enabled DR advertising, Google enabled long-tail ecommerce and media, and Facebook/Twitter enabling social gaming (Playfish/Zynga), social commerce (Groupon, Gilt), and soon will enable other categories to be reinvented as well (Travel, Finance, etc).

2. The Rise of the New Software Stack
While threatened before, the traditional stack for managing apps and data has come under its final assault. The old infrastructure was designed for reservations and financial transactions (precision at all costs), while the data from new applications is 3 orders of magnitude larger and often generated by machine or other non-financial activity (logs, clicks, metadata, links, streams, etc.). The new companies (Google, Facebook, Zynga) have solved this with a new infrastructure "stack," (Hadoop, MemcacheD) for the masses as even small companies have big data problems.

Esther Dyson:
1. HomeBrew Health: We don’t need no stinkin’ care! We’ll manage our bodies the way we manage our budgets, and reduce our health care costs by not needing care.

80 words: That’s aspirational, but it’s happening and will spread. Quantified Selfers will monitor their own vital signs and behaviors, using tools such as Nike+, FitBit, MyZeo (sleep monitor). Game dynamics will let them compete/collaborate with others. There’s a huge market for health care, and a huge market for bad health (cigarettes, too much alcohol, fatty/sweet foods). Now there will also be a market for good health. Over time, aggregated data will persuade employers and even insurers to pay, broadening the market further.

2. Long-term accountability is the new transparency:

Transparency was great, but the market demands results, not just visibility. Nonprofits and for-profits alike will be measured on the results of their spending – on ROI rather than donations, on the creation of sustainable businesses rather than short-term gains. Wal-Mart and others lead the way with focused programs for employees and supply-chain visibility, while the World Bank will publish its spending so that putative beneficiaries get what was promised.

Ron Conway:
1) the web is now truly social since consumers are more Open and Willing to Share data resulting in explosive growth and monetization as proven by the widespread adoption of Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites.

Proof: Twitter will grow to 1B searches a day across its ecosystem (up from 600m today) and Facebook will grow to over 500m users in the coming months.

2) the real-time web, the corpus of time-relevant data created by users collective wisdom will be a billion dollar oppty in 2010.

Twitter led the charge, and now companies are integrating time-relevancy/LBS into products like FourSquare who will grow to 3-5m users over the next 12 months

Here’s the ABC news coverage of this Churchill Club event last night.