The "Unhyped" New Areas in Internet and Mobile

We are in a whole new world of platforms, a post-PC era, which I'd more aptly describe as the always/everywhere era, in short, and that means a whole new set of opportunities. Add to it the fact that because of a variety of factors too numerous to cover here, the cost of experimentation has gone down dramatically and raw computing power is taken for granted.

What you get as a result are the recent successes in the Internet/mobile space like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Zynga, Groupon and others, all of which have reenergized both entrepreneurs and investors. Many of these new startups will be the usual poor clones or feature add-ons to Facebook and Twitter, or poor attempts at doing one feature or another better than Zynga, or applying LinkedIn to a small vertical.

Few will be successful

A few will be successful, many will fail, some will be acquired for a piece of research or for the team. Nevertheless that does leave the question: What else new has the potential to be in point of fact disruptive or establish a new category in the domain of consumer Internet/mobile/services?

The post-PC always/everywhere platform will be defined by the many variations of mobile, always available, silent complementary standbys and more. A new category to me means doing something old differently enough to have it become a large business or have substantial impact among users.

AirBnB and Instagram would be examples of companies whose categories existed prior to their entry, nevertheless they are meaningfully different. In the same fashion, LinkedIn was not the first professional social network yet it had substantial new impact and business potential.

Of course, it is hard to classify any startup into a single category. Kaggle is both big data and a marketplace for data scientists. Ness is at its core a big data analytics play nevertheless its appeal is primarily emotional. Many as a matter of fact are in the main enabled by the new mobility and capability in both phones and tablets.

I chose not to define mobile or tablets as a category nevertheless it evidently is a major driving force behind much of this technology; mobile is the theme that underlies the concept of "post-PC" or "always/everywhere." The emergence of new languages like HTML5 will enable more research, which will sell more devices, and drive furthermore innovation. Other capabilities like sensors around always/everywhere devices will enable health, the Internet of things and other functions. Compasses, GPS sensors, accelerometers, touch interfaces, voice, and image capture all open the door for rich new experiences. I consider all of these enablers in other words than categories by themselves.

I ignored areas like cloud computing, because they are not new anymore. Given the consumer orientation of this post, I as well ignored the changes in enterprise that consumer technologies are driving. That trend I suspect will continue to accelerate and surprise.There will be both large permanent innovations and categories established as then as passing fads. I don’t list games as a "new pond" here, although it will continue to grow and surprise us in categories-whatever the straightway Angry Birds/Farmville phenomenon will be-during gamification will become pervasive in everything from education to health to shopping. Given the similarity to social's ubiquity, I admit a slight inconsistency given that I've included new classes of social applications labeled Social Then. Both gamification and social may become basic tools that enable many of the areas I mentioned. Nevertheless, I cite some examples of what defines Social Then versus adding social functionality to an application like e-commerce.

I as well did not focus on e-commerce given its already substantial popularity. Nevertheless, we will continue to see innovations in this area, especially given the different optimizations that are possible on new sized screens like mobile phones. I expect e-commerce to be disrupted by many of these ponds-and the move toward all commerce being e-commerce creates massive potential. To illustrate, what's the potential impact on local merchant expertise getting supplanted by mountains of behavior data, curation and social recommendations? I wonder what will happen to local or hyper local products; will that be the domain of the traditional large players or Internet players given their scale and greater access to data versus the local merchants? That question is in the hands of the data analytics and data reduction applications. Will some local merchant expertise get supplanted by disruptive data analytics and reduction in some categories, during other services and certain products from local merchants get enhanced?

Facebook has validated another category I haven't mentioned, “Timeline", and others are looking at "health timelines." This is a feature that will show up everywhere and, to me, is more of a tool than an application. There will as well be innovation services like Singly and Dropbox that allow applications with new utility and features to be built. NFC may as well just end up as a basic service research, however I listed it above in the hope that it enables a new class of applications. There are probably other universal features that will at first look like applications.

As with innovation movements previously it, the Maker movement has laid the groundwork for what will be the then industrial revolution based around personalized fabrication from one-off runs with 3-D printers to at-scale manufacturing. I am not but sure that this will be a category in the straightway 2-3 years, nevertheless it will happen sometime. I do want my sofa custom-made for the size of my living room, in custom colors, and perhaps a custom design during cutting out all the expensive intermediaries in the supply chain. As an illustration, I recently came across an intriguing example of crowdsourced design for custom vehicles and automotive parts by Local Motors.

Venture capital firm started in 2004

Khosla Ventures is a venture capital firm started in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, Co-Founder of Sun Microsystems. The firm focuses on environmentally friendly technologies should the contingency arise to the traditional venture areas just as the Internet, computing, mobile and silicon innovation arenas.