Tonight we attended the Churchill Club’s 11th Annual Top Ten Tech Trends event. These take place every year to predict the next big trends in the industry. This year was a bit different from previous years as each of the five panelists outlined one trend and the rest were “crowd-sourced,” meaning the moderators picked them based on things like which areas are getting venture funding and the number of press mentions.
After each trend was presented, the panelists voted on it (a green paddle held up if they agreed, a red one if they disagreed). They then debated its merits, before the audience got to vote in the same way. Here’s a rundown of the 10 trends along with who came up with them.
1. The Millennials Are Here. Everything is changing. Rapidly! — Joe Schoendorf, Partner, Accel Partners
The idea here is that the age group about to graduate from college is going to take over the world. That itself is of course just about the most obvious statement in the world, but Schoendorf specifically meant that a generation is about to take over that doesn’t remember what it was like not to be online — these are the “millennials.” He feels these with further innovation farther than ever before because they were born with the web.
The audience mostly agreed on this trend.
2. Advanced batteries will be the most popular alternative energy investment in ‘09 and’10. — Crowd Idea
The group noted that while the press seems to love talking about this trend, it never seems to happen. Battery technology has been very slow to advanced over the past few decades, and there isn’t much to suggest that this will change anytime soon. That said, if there’s is one company that can nail an advanced battery, it will be huge.
The crowd was evenly mixed on this trend.
3. The unstructured data deluge creates the next great information leaders — Ann Winblad, Partner, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
Enterprise data growth will be huge in five years, and 80 percent of that will be unstructured, says Winblad. Some argued that this idea isn’t particularly new — but most agreed that the time is indeed right for this.
The crowd mostly agreed with this trend.
4. Wireless broadband that will one of the only IT sectors to see increased funding this year — Crowd Idea
Everyone agreed that this is a very old idea. Even with more investment in the field that boosts bandwidth, people will want more bandwidth.
The crowd almost entirely disagreed with this trend.
5. “Maintech” not “Cleantech” — Increasing carbon efficiency of global GDP — Vinod Khosla, Founder, Khosla Ventures
Khosla believes that we’re on the verge of a carbon-constraint economy. But he thinks that it’s not necessarily the hot “greentech” trend that will thrive in this economy, because it’s still too small a part of the market. Instead, look to newer ideas in more traditional energy technology. A lot of the smartest students in this country are getting into the energy tech field, he notes.
Pretty much everyone agreed with this trend.
6. Power and efficiency management services will see a flowering of investment and innovation — Crowd Idea
The idea here is that energy going forward isn’t necessarily going to be about building new power plants, but instead will be about figuring out how better to distribute the power we’re already creating. The smart grid will be increasingly important and a number of companies are working on this.
The crowd mostly agreed with this trend.
7. The triumph of the distributed web — Steve Jurvetson, Managing Director, Draper Fisher Jurvetson
The distributed web is “the aggregate power of all of you,” according to Jurvetson. He believes that crowds will control much of the interesting things people look for on the web. People are already spending more time in social networks than on email. He also briefly went into the idea of the new things going on in search — not just real-time crowd-sourced options, but also ideas that new versions of search could come from watching what everyone is doing on the browser level as they surf the web.
The audience was about half and half on trend.
8. Healthcare administration will see the best growth in B2B software in ‘09 and ‘10 – Crowd Idea
Because they were running short on time, the group skipped this one, which everyone dubbed as old news.
9. Consumption of digital goods on mobile devices is THE growth story of the coming decade — Ram Shriram, Managing Partner, Sherpalo Ventures, LLC
Shriram believes an ad model cannot continue to fuel growth in the mobile space. He thinks application building may be the model that does it, noting that we’re already seeing it across a variety of platforms in both the mobile and social networking space. He also believes that there’s a trend towards paid applications — though cheap ones — and that will be enough to blossom the industry. Some of the panel thought certain barriers, like the mobile carriers.
The audience mostly agreed with this trend.
10. Electronic displays will prove the hottest investment in hardware this year and the next — Crowd Idea
Again, running short on time, the panel barely talked about this one, but suggested there’s no real money to be made here even though the trend is hot.
The audience almost completely disagreed with this trend.
The Bonus Round
Finally, the two moderators, Tony Perkins, the founder of AlwaysOn and Jason Pontin, the Editor in Chief of Technology Review (and former he former Editor of Red Herring), got to put up two trends. These were:
1) DC will prove to be a poor VC
Washington trying to get involved in funding new ventures in technology will fail. Entrepreneurs need to be allowed to do what they do best, without government meddling.
The audience all agreed with this trend.
2) The rumors of the demise of the reporter have been exaggerated
While newspapers and magazines will continue to die, there needs to be a place for real journalism in the world — even if it is online. Blogs cannot replace trained journalism — it’s a collaborative process between professionals, Pontin argued. Some of the panel took exception to the notion that bloggers can’t also do journalism, but all agreed that there needs to be reporting on things like the Iraq war.
The audience mostly agreed with this trend.
Summary
Energy, data and more energy were definitely the main themes discussed with the trends this year. There was also a lot of back and forth that many of the ideas being brought up were old ones. That rang true to me, but perhaps that’s to be expected we’re in down times, so you stick with what works (or has been predicted to work in the past).
Overall, the panelists trends seemed almost too specific while the crowd-sourced trends were too general. Likewise, the discussions on those topics went from too focused, to not nearly focused enough.
There were some interesting discussions on the energy front, as well as a bit on the mobile space — though surprisingly only Shriram really singled it out. Jurvetson’s talk briefly hit on the real-time web and Twitter which everyone was very opinionated about — but then boring crowd-sourced topics would come up and kill the discussion.
Before the panel began, the moderators went over last year’s trend to see how the previous panel had done. Most didn’t do too well, and I would suspect the same from this panel. Too many of the ideas are still a long time out, or are rehashed trends that no one really seemed to want to even talk about.
Very interesting commentary – sometimes, they can see around corners. I liked Steve Jurvetson’s prediction. Vinod helped him out to expand on the idea decentralized data, being user driven, such as what we are seeing emerge in real-time search
This was an entertaining discussion. Tony and Jason did a great job volleying the conversation in between panel assertions. I thought it odd (so analog) to have little pieces of red and green paper to vote with – why weren’t we allow to Twitter our vote? This would have truly captured the “wisdom of the crowd” in real time
Very informative. So energy, millenials, and new search.
They forgot realtime? Or that fits in with search?
Interesting.
Btw, too many typos in the post, was hard to follow in places:(
Hi there, i take quite an interest in the following that was discussed. I work at an IT Academy and we prepare students for whats to come. Technology is the new age, we have a bit of a crisis though. ICT Skills shortage vs Economic crisis. CTU Training Solutions is trying to bridge this gap, but we still need help with placing our students.
3 sounds really interesting, but details are sparse. Are there any more details you could provide.
We’re very interested in data mining.
http://www.traderbots.com
ya, very intersting, let’s wait and watch,
‘Real time’ is the latest trend, every bigg site is changing to real time search and new additions.
Yes, I think the trend that Washington will most probably fail in funding will be most likely. Entreprenuers do it best. Let them handle their business.
Search is over rated for so many reasons.
There are a few audiences that need untuned real time. All the rest will be happy with push and selective pull.
Energy and greentech are so cool that they are virtually assured financing through politicians wanting hype.
Here is a summary of the 2008 trends. Are they really trends if there is no science and proof to back it up? http://ventureb...hones-and-more/
Yeah what a lovely post really enjoyed while reading this 1
APreciated
I would have really liked to have been there. Sounds like it was more than entertaining to be a part of. I wasn’t trendy enough to be in-the-know. Next time!
“The Millennials Are Here. Everything is changing. Rapidly!”
He is correct the Civic Generation is here. I wrote about it http://www.2009depression.com
Interesting ideas…
The post needed an editor; many sentences were not well formed and had many typos.
wow i never realized how big this site was
Good info, some obvious, some not. Batteries? Good luck.
Oh yeah, does anyone edit anymore? There were so many grammatical mistakes in this post it left me wondering from what third world tent this article was written.
just fyi, I did highlight the real-time web and decentralized user data (passive and active) as the key underpinnings of my trend… and used search as one of three examples. Not sure how Vinod thought he was expanding it; I must have communicated poorly.
Don’t know about others but I personally felt this years event was very substandard. The discussions lacked depth and somehow the ideas were sorta rehashed. Given the kinda panelists, I expected a little more maybe.
Maybe next time the ideas will be real ideas that will become trends. I for sure was disappointed this year….. batteries, wifi, electronic displays …. yeah rite. And millenials that have not known what it is not to have been online ? yeah go back 20 years and relate it to a generation that didn’t know how people lived without TV. And the idiot box is a relic now….. Trend ???? Well……
Hey MG, this top ten list is fantastic. Thank you for breaking everything down into a summary of the most important points of this conference. It will be interesting to see how the industry and the economy as a whole rebounds. Energy is going to be very important as it is already, long-term ists a good play. You can post this to our site http://www.toptentopten.com/ and link back to your site. We are trying to create a directory for top ten lists where people can find your site. The coolest feature is you can let other people vote on the rankings of your list.
Would love to see the advanced battery popularity come to pass, but alas, I’m losing faith after hearing about this for so long…..
Couldnt agree more with the first one “The Millennials Are Here. Everything is changing. Rapidly!”
Generation Y is about to take over as the last of us are graduating from college now. With such a bad economy we are either creating opportunities or changing those that we get to work better for us. Everything is online and flat.
Just as long as we keep a clean reputation online, we will be fine. We have a bad rep with Facebook and other social networks for being out of control and unfocused.
Now onto DC vs VC… this is a no brainier. The government just bailed out all the major banks and people are afraid to invest for good reason. But once the feds get involved everything changes. They also aren’t qualified to make these decisions and will prob hire VC’s to run it, so it may work…
>> Generation Y is about to take over
shouldn’t that be – you are about to be taken over?
da best. Keep it going! Thank you
Interesting.
Interesting………
I like it…