Tonight I attended the 12th Annual Top 10 Tech Trends program of the Churchill Club in San Jose. Five Silicon Valley luminaries gave their predictions of what's going to be hot in the next 12 months. Potential winners included product categories such as social networking, health care, new life forms and connected devices plus more general ideas such as the best time to start a company and long-term accountability, The audience was given the opportunity to cast their vote on each, courtesy of a real-time voting device provided by iml Connector (www.imlworldwide.com/beyondvoting). The event can be viewed here (registration required) http://fora.tv/conference/top_ten_tech_trends_2010. FYI, I have no relationship with either of these companis.
Presenting their thoughts were a panel including:
- Ron Conway, Angel Investor, SV Angel
- Esther Dyson, Chairman, EDventure Holdings
- Kevin Efrusy, General Partner, Accel Partners
- Steve Jurvetson, Managing Director, Draper Fisher Jurvetson
- David Weiden, General Partner, Khosla Ventures
So, in the Dave Letterman tradition (minus the humor), here are the Top Ten, based on audience voting:
10. Home-Brew Health (Esther Dyson, 188 yes votes). "We don't neeed no stinkin' health care!" There will be a huge market for self-administered health care devices, beyond measuring your weight, moving into steps walked per day, blood pressure monitoring, and more. Beyond early adopters, would be funded by both employers and insurance companies.
9. The Web is Now Truly Social (Ron Conway, 198 yes votes). Facebook will be at 500M users in the next few years. Twitter is one-to-many. Searching is a huge opportunity. Twitter has 1B tweets per day, up from 600M a few months ago. Just look at "chatroulotte.com." It could grow in a huge way once the porn is eliminated. This is an example of behaviorial engineering.
8. Long-Term Accountability (Esther Dyson, 223 yes votes). Long-term accountability is the new transparancy. Examples include funded.com. "Is this a good place to work?"
7. The Next 100B Connected Devices (David Weiden, 230 yes votes). Apple has a $200B market valuation; RIM's is $40B. "Hardware is the new software."
6. Code Comes Alive (Steve Jurvetson, 267 yes votes). An application will become a life form. Examples include waste conversion and water purification. Steve cited Moore's law as a moderate growth curve, gene sequencing as a higher curve, and the code of life as a hyper curve. Examples include DNA synthesis. But watch out...there could be a few potential problems, ala Frankenstein (my words).
5. The Real-Time Web (Ron Conway, 272 yes votes). There is a huge commerce opportunity coming. Examples include Twitter and Foursquare.
4. It's a Wonderful Time to Start a Company (Steve Jurvetson, 290 yes votes). Of the companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, 63% were started in a recession. Why does this work? Less competition, easier to recruit great people, and an intense focus on winning.
3. The Internet Gets a New Patient: Health Care (David Weiden, 299 yes votes). The federal government will be paying $44K to any doctor who "makes an effort" to use electronic medical records. With the recently passed health care initiative, there will be an additional 30M insured patients. Applications such as electronic prescriptions are just the tip of the iceberg.
2. The Rise of the New Software Stack (Kevin Efrusy, 302 yes votes). Business transaction data will seem like a drop in the bucket vs. web application data on the growth curve. Look for companies like NorthScale and Cloudera to be influential in this category in the future.
And the Number One Tech Trend for the next 12 months:
1. The Social Web as a Substitute for New Category Killers (Kevin Efrusy, 337 yes votes). In the category of televisions, we believed what we were told. Then we moved to web portals such as Yahoo. Then search engines. The social web takes us to the next level with such applications as groupon.com and zynga.com.
Kevin Efrusy was voted by the audience as the "Trend Idol."
Want to know the details of how the audience voted? See below.
| TREND |
PREDICTED BY: |
YES
|
NO
|
TOTAL
|
% YES
|
| Home-Brew Health |
Esther Dyson |
188 |
217 |
405 |
46.42% |
| The Web is Now Truly Social |
Ron Conway |
198 |
142 |
340 |
58.24% |
| Long-Term Accountability |
Esther Dyson |
223 |
147 |
370 |
60.27% |
| The Next 100,000,000,000 Connected Devices |
David Weiden |
230 |
166 |
396 |
58.08% |
| Code Comes Alive |
Steve Jurvetson |
267 |
102 |
369 |
72.36% |
| The Real-Time Web |
Ron Conway |
272 |
102 |
374 |
72.73% |
| It's a Wonderfuyl Time to Start a Company |
Steve Jurvetson |
290 |
107 |
397 |
73.05% |
| The Internet Gets a New Patient: Health Care |
David Weiden |
299 |
45 |
344 |
86.92% |
| The Rise of the New Software Stack |
Kevin Efrusy |
302 |
55 |
357 |
84.59% |
| Social Web as Substitute for New Category Killers |
Kevin Efrusy |
337 |
59 |
396 |
85.10% |