Churchill Club's 9th Annual Top 10 Tech Trends Debate

Way too many balls in the air. Way too much context switching between work, family, marketing finals, marketing simulation (Sabre), cost accounting assignment etc ad nauseum. I tell myself not to forget the larger goal - to be an entrepreneur or be involved with entrepreneurship in a significant way. I couldn't resist the idea of going to Churchill Club's 9th Annual Top 10 Tech Trends Debate today.

UPDATE: Pointer to SJ Merc Review of the Event.

The basic format of the event was that the moderator or a panel of star VCs would make a prediction. There would be a short debate at the end of which the audience gets a chance to wave a green card or a red card for the prediction.

The VC panel consisted of John Doerr (Kleiner), Steve Jurvetson (DFJ), Roger McNamee (Integral Capital Partners), Joe Schoendorf (Accel Partners). Tony Perkins from AlwaysOn was the moderator.

The top trends from my notes. I've tried to annotate who mentioned the trend.

1. Mobile Devices: There are going to be many more design centers for devices, requiring more "belt space" [Roger McNamee - RM]
2. FCC will approve at least one new broadband network in the next year. More broadband freely available is the best thing you can do to reduce digital divide, improve possibilites for education and its good for VCs! [John Doerr - JD]
3. There will be a web 2.0 "shakeout" in the next 12 months and the "shakeout" won't include mobile. "Shakeout" here means reduced, down rounds of investment. [Tony Perkins - TP]
4. Moore's law will bifurcate to the point where technological advances in memory will precede logic by several years. [Don't remember who said this. Could've been Steve Jurvetson - SJ]
5. Power shift: Shift in economic power to the BRIC nations will profoundly impact current business. [Joe Schoendorf - JS]
6. Active Media: Consumers are choosing active media over passive media which will erode power of today's media companies and will require a re-engineering of the advertising business. [Roger McNamee - RM]
7. Enterprise Web 2.0: Web2.0 functionality will move to enterprise and media in a big way. [TP]
8. The next two years will herald first synthetic life form. [SJ]
   
9. The Brain: Rise of radical approaches to treating brain disease. [JS]
   
10. Going green could be the largest economic opportunity and imperative of the 21st century. [JD, of course!]

I know this doesn't give you the complete picture. I'll try to write some more notes on each "trend" as time permits!