Business Week writes about Churchill Club’s Seventh annual Top Ten Technology Trends dinner, and the ten trends identified:
1. Web services will evolve and create new businesses
2. Patients will demand online medical records
3. Corporate computing won’t see big changes for at least five years
4. The next big tech innovation will come out of China
5. Blogging and other online content will force traditional media to change
6. California will lead the world in embryonic stem-cell research
7. Text messaging will become more pervasive
8. New consumer technologies will appeal to more than just young hipsters
9. Every consumer-electronic product you own is about to become obsolete
10. Utility computing will keep tech spending strong
Barron’s adds:
Always a crowd-pleaser, a panel of four tech experts predicted trends that should take hold over the next two or three years. The panel included Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist John Doerr, whose most recent mega-hit is Google; CNET pundit Esther Dyson; private-equity investor and Barron’s Tech Forum veteran Roger McNamee; and Accel Partners venture capitalist Joe Schoendorf. The moderator was AlwaysOn founder Tony Perkins, who co-founded the original incarnation of Red Herring magazine.
McNamee has traditionally been the panel’s lone voice with a perspective on public markets (he is a founding partner with Integral Capital Partners, a Menlo Park hedge fund that was seeded by Kleiner Perkins), but his recent diversions with a rock band and a private-equity partnership, Silver Lake Partners, has him less focused these days on public-market trends we can all profit by.
Still, he made the most unpopular — but probably most poignant — prediction of the evening: There will be no major waves of enterprise-technology spending equivalent to the 1990s’ for another five years. There will be nothing to match the evolution of Windows in the early ‘Nineties, the introduction of Enterprise Resource Planning in the mid-1990s, and the Y2K build-up of 1999, he said.
Yet Accel’s Schoendorf found a silver lining in McNamee’s cloud. The venture capitalist said that whenever “Silicon Valley” declares a trend over or a market kaput, it usually means that the opposite will actually be the case.
Schoendorf added: “This is actually a good, bullish sign.”
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