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Churchill Club Top 10 Tech Trends 2015 Debate

(From Steve Jurvetson's Facebook post)

Churchill Club Top 10 Tech Trends 2015 Debate
“What new trends will emerge in the next several years with the potential for explosive growth in about five years' time?” Five VCs are chosen by the Churchill Club to submit two Tech Trends, aggregating to a Top 10 list. We then debate the issues on stage and the audience votes in real time.

I have done this for ten years now, and it gets progressively more difficult to come up with two new trends each year that are important, and non-obvious, and likely to come true.

This year, my fellow panelists were Bill Gurley of Benchmark, Jenny Lee of GGV, Rebecca Lynn of Canvas, and Shervin Pishevar of Shepa Ventures.

Here is some of the press coverage:
http://blogs.wsj.com/…/robocars-and-hyperloops-10-tech-pre…/

http://www.forbes.com/…/five-top-venture-capitalists…/print/

http://www.eweek.com/…/ambient-computing-disruptive-banking…

http://www.forbes.com/…/05/22/five-top-vcs-predict-the-fut…/

and the full video: https://youtu.be/qQIu5UO6OZ8

Our 2015 Top 10 list

1. On-Demand Ambient Computing.
On-Demand Ambient Computing driven by AI will usher in a world of invisible computing that will drive efficiencies across many industries. Growth will come from API's/algorithms across mobile platforms; AI will predict human intent and deliver items/information at the speed of human thought. [Shervin Pishevar]

2. Traditional Banks Will Continue Losing Share to Startups while Bitcoin Fades in Relevance.
Financial-services institutions will continue to be disintermediated, and will either act as the back-end infrastructure or co-exist as they do in the Lending Club model. Meanwhile, Bitcoin as a currency and remittance solution will lose steam. [Rebecca Lynn]

3. The Virtual Me.
Advances in hardware and sensors and the adoption of connected devices will create an explosion of personal data in the next 5 years. With increased data processing capabilities and smarter predictive software, all this data will be aggregated into personal digital profiles – the virtual you – which will know even more about you than you do. [Jenny Lee]

4. The Skynet Economy: broadband access for the unconnected billions.
From thousands of satellites orbiting around the poles, and new airborne transponders, the entire Earth will be bathed in broadband, bringing an unprecedented influx of human talent to the global economy. [Steve Jurvetson]

5. The End of the Auto Nation.
For the better part of a century, the United States has designed its cities around the notion of individual car ownership. This has resulted in massive waste, congestion, pollution, long commute times, remarkably underutilized capital assets, and over 30,000 deaths per year. Suburban sprawl reached its ultimate limit, and the trends are all rebounding around a new urbanization. [Bill Gurley]

6. 5th Mode of Transportation.
5th Mode of Transportation will be unlocked in the next 5 years. Technologies like Hyperloop will skip over 19th and 20th century transportation modes and do what wireless mobile communication did to fixed line telecommunications in places like Africa. [Shervin Pishevar]

7. Reemergence of Women in Tech.
In the next 5 years, 50% of computer-science students will be women – surpassing the previous high set in 1984. This means you’ll increasingly see more female technology startup founders and Fortune-500 CEOs. [Rebecca Lynn]

8. The Economy of Me.
By 2020, mobile will bring the next 2 billion people online and make the online economy more powerful than the offline. This shift will breed decentralized business models. Commerce and services will skip the middle man and revolve around the individual consumer. Welcome to the personal economy. [Jenny Lee]

9. Rise of the Robocars: Driven by a Machine [the winning trend].
By 2020 we will no longer debate the inevitability of autonomous electric vehicles when we first experience the convenience and efficiency of urban autonomous driving services. [Steve Jurvetson]

10. The Native Mobile Application Platform Dominates the “Mobile Web”.
Consumers drastically prefer mobile applications to the mobile web because they are WAY better. The majority of incremental Internet users will be exclusively on smartphones. The aging search/browser platform will be stifled as a fertile ground for new innovation. [Bill Gurley]

Following up on our debate about the inevitability of autonomous electric vehicles, the IMF just released a study tabulating the subsidy that fossil fuel companies receive: over $14 billion per day. "The IMF calls the revelation shocking and says the figure is an extremely robust estimate of the true cost of fossil fuels. The $5.3tn subsidy estimated for 2015 is greater than the total health spending of all the world’s governments." — form http://www.theguardian.com/…/fossil-fuel-companies-getting-…