Over the last decade and a half, I have been immersed in creating companies and the trials and excitement which go with them. What follows is a list of my memories, mentoring, meetings, mistakes, musings and words of wisdom I was taught or learned the hard way, about business, startups and life.
I am writing this to not forget them.
Cloud+Services - Physical servers disappearing and being replaced by either servers in the cloud or companies who provide those services and the management of them. The volume has more than doubled each of the last 5 years. At the AWS conference, they said that now, each day, they turn on as many new computers as Amazon used to use to run their $5B business a few years ago.
Sci-Fi Interfaces - 3D gesture, eye tracking, complex multi-touch, full voice recognition and facial expression detection are all coming of age this year, with multiple companies showing working devices that will be coming out in the next 12 months. The question is how these will be fused with the operating systems as there are not yet any key apps which make them absolutely necessary. (Leap Motion, Intel, Kinect, Tobii, SMI, Nuance, Affectiva,...)
Home 3D Printing - While it has been around for more than a decade and the actual technology hasn't changed, the PR behind it and the number of startups trying to create consumer versions has gone up significantly. The only challenge is that while people really like the idea, they don't know what plastic things they want to print. Maybe there is a market for selling products that aren't real - they are just the 3D printing file for the actual product that the consumer can create at home. (Makerbot, 3D Systems ...)
Display = Computer - With phones, tablets, XL tablets and now coffee table tablets, the idea of needing a monitor and a key board as a single device is no longer mandatory. People are going to think of their computer as just a display and expect it to do everything.
