Churchill Club Top Ten Trends Event
By Dean Takahashi
Mar 28, 2007
San Jose Mercury News
I attended the Churchill Club’s annual Top Ten Trends event today at the Fairmont in San Jose. It was an entertaining evening listening to emcee Tony Perkins of Always On as he grilled some of the most successful Silicon Valley venture capitalists talk about their predictions for the next year or two.
There were about 800 people present, and they all got green or red cards to vote up or down on the trends being proposed. Roger McNamee, general partner at Elevation Partners, sported some long hair, and that’s appropriate for a rock star investor. He predicted that mobile device designs will explode, giving consumers more choices for things to hang on their belts (or put in their purses) in the same way that they have choices of shoes to wear. Steve Jurvetson of Draper Fisher Jurvetson raised his red sign, saying that there’s a limit to what people will put on the belts. He was perfectly happy, he said, with his “crackberry.”
John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers chimed in and said tha the biggest selling mobile device in the next year will be the iPhone. Joe Schoendorf of Accel Partners noted that Cingular says it has a million people signed up to get iPhones already.
Doerr said his prediction is that the cell phone will be the next PC. And he added that the FCC will approve one new broadband network in the next year. That will bode well for iPhones and other devices that put stress on the current cellular infrastructure.
Perkins predicted that the Web 2.0 consumer web market would suffer a shake-out. He thinks that Google paid too much when it agreed to buy YouTube for $1.6 billion. “If there were any justice, that would be true,” said Doerr. But he said that won’t happen since Web 2.0 has enormous momentum behind it. There were 300 Web 2.0 (think user-generated videos) startups funded in 2005 and there were 500 in 2006. There is so much money going into the area that it will fuel growth for some time, he said.
Schoendorf said the addition of a billion new people into the online world would keep consumer video rolling along. He believes there will be four or five mega-billion plays in the video space from mobile on up. McNamee predicted that Web 2.0 would spread from the young crowd to mainstream audiences and older adults.
Jurvetson predicted that Moore’s Law will continue but it will bifurcate. He predicted advances in memory would precede logic by several years. He brought up the self-assembly techniques of new nanotechnology materials. With self-assembly, you essentially splash a bunch of designer molecules onto a wafer and they organize themselves into patterns. Such materials will lend themselves to memory, which follows a redundant pattern. Logic, by contrast, takes too much design and nuance in the design. McNamee said he hoped Jurvetson was right because mobile devices would need an “ungodly” amount of low-power, small form factor memory. Doerr said he believes that chip companies will have to be able to create an advantage in process manufacturing, not just design. Graphics chip makers such as Nvidia, he said, are exceptions where design matters the most. Over time, he said he expects large players will roll over rivals who don’t have any process advantages.
Schoendorf said he expects to see a very big power shift in world economics as new players enter the global economy. He said he was prepared to bet on India as a winner, partly because India currently has three workers to every retiree. Schoendorf said that in China there are 450 million active cell phones with 5 million new phones a month.
McNamee predicted that consumers would become active media consumers, no longer passively watching shows on the couch but actually creating their own entertainment. Web 2.0, he said, shifts the power to the consumer. (Sounds like the column I wrote in December on Henry Jenkins book on new media).
Perkins predicted that consumer Web 2.0 functions would move to the enterprise. The features of Facebook, for instance, could be used to figure out which employees went to the same school. Wikis and instant messenging are great tools that corporations should exploit, Schoendorf said. He noted that kids going into college this year had no memory of a life without the Internet (assuming their active memory starts around five years old).
Jurvetson threw another zany prediction out when he said that someone would create a synthetic life form in the next couple of years. But he said there are teams of researchers who have demonstrated the ability to take the DNA out of an organism, insert foreign DNA, and thereby change the species of the organism. He also said that in the last year, one research team hsa discovered 90 percent of the DNA on the planet. It’s a brave new world, he said. Perkins joked that Jurvetson isn’t on hallucinogenic drugs.
Doerr said that a late UC Berkeley luminary told him that “synthetic biology is the next great platform.” Schoendorf said that biotech has a bright future, particularly in California.
Schoendorf’s next prediction was that treatments for physical illnesses of the brain would arise to treat brain-related problems such as depression or schizophrenia. He said the federal government is shifting $1 billion into research into neurobiology, and he noted there are 100 such startups in California alone.
Doerr closed the night with a familiar theme of his. He expects the world will go green as everyone pursues the opportunities in rescuing the environment from greenhouse gases. He predicted a revolution in green technology that could replace today’s $6 trillion energy economy.
“My fear is that even if we do that, it’s not going to be enough” to stop global warming, he said. “We have to go carbon neutral and carbon negative in the face of pressures” such as the urbanization of China and other countries. He notes that Brazil has gone eco-friendly with 23,000 ethanol pumps in the country and as a result has shaved its greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent. But Brazil accounts for only 1.3 percent of the world’s carbon emissions. Hence, it is reducing the problem by only 0.13 percent.
He noted that the U.S. accounts for 5.8 gigatons of carbon emissions and China about 3.3 gigatons. At current rates, China alone could account for 23 gigatons by 2050.
“If we stick with business as usual, the world will be out of business,” Doerr said.
Schoendorf said that the task of turning around places such as China will be tough, since that country has 700 million people who go to bed hungry at night. The pressure to provide jobs could run counter to the need to reduce carbon emissions
