Melody McCloskey

I wanted to break down my thoughts on where I think our industry is going because I feel like with all the micro-sensationalism we can lose sight of the bigger picture stuff.

Looking at the facts, there’s less VC money available now than in the past few years, Robin Wauters at Tech Crunch gives a grim but solid overview. We’re in a technology slump, with many big name founders/innovators tied up in companies they bet big on a few years ago and few other standout players doing innovative things. The biggest excitement in the past year or two has been Twitter as a real time platform. While this is huge, it’s the only very major trend we’re seeing and there isn’t a new Google, Paypal, LinkedIn or Youtube these days besides, perhaps Facebook.

What does this mean? We’re going to see lots of smaller companies, getting more modest valuations, taking in less money (not necessarily through VCs), and selling for less. The average period from inception to exit may lengthen (I think it’s around 7 years right now), and the wins may be smaller.

Knowing this, what can we do to be in the best position when the upswing takes effect? The truth is there are many many more opportunities available now that weren’t when the industry was growing five/ten years ago. Whereas entrepreneurs were hand-picked, fostered and groomed by the few at the top, this training is now much easier to come by. The technology (hardware, etc) to start a company is much cheaper than it used to be, and we’re going to see lots of smaller, non-glamorous anti-web 2.0 companies sprout up.

Organizations like the Founder’s Institute are educating the next generation of entrepreneurs and providing them the tools, knowledge and contacts to build businesses.  There’s also a huge opportunity for the industry to leverage our civil society, building communities around product and collective expertise (not just cupcakes) to help drive the next innovation. Let’s talk about how we got to where we are now, and hash out ideas for where we need to be [I actually wonder if this needs to be driven by one person rather than the collective, interested in opinion here.]*

Here are the main opportunities I see in the next few years:

• Government data is becoming available for the first time in history, what APIs are being developed and what innovations and learnings can we farm from them, package and use to make industry better?

• Twitter’s ready to wear real-time platform, is huge, growing and begging for products to be built on top of it

• iPhone’s platform is still in it’s infancy and there are plenty of opps for companies/apps/games to be let lose on it’s enormous distribution platform. Not many apps have tapped into the gyroscope or location services really well, we’ll see a lot more to come

• The development of better recommendation engines that capture implicit information about users to provide better customized services, targeting

• the merging of the digital, media and real worlds. Iphone apps, cross platform media, and real world events combined with live streaming technologies are going to produce some really cool products and experiences

• devices and media (Kindle, Crunchpad I’m looking at you). Huge opportunities for media to eliminate distribution costs, tailor content to customers and become cheaper.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, ideas and anything you think I’ve missed. What are the best companies out there right now? I posed this question on Twitter with intention to post the answers here, but Search.Twitter doesn’t allow historical searches more than a few days (fail) so sorry about that. All the more reason to weigh in here! Also, I’m still working on a fix for video comments, hoping to roll it out soon. That one’s for you, David Kadavy

*I’d love to rally a group of people obsessed about product and technology to meet and hash out ideas. Let me know if you’re interested in something like this, I’m still thinking through the format, etc but if you’re interested in coming or contributing let me know.