Mobile is so over - so here are 20 possible "New" Next Things

Interesting 2 paragraphs from Fred Wilson's blog, talking about "what's next":

But the roadmap has been clear for the past seven years (maybe longer). The next thing was mobile. Mobile is now the last thing. And all of these big tech companies are looking for the next thing to make sure they don’t miss it.. And they will pay real money (to you and me) for a call option on the next thing.

It isn’t clear if the next thing is virtual reality, the internet of things, drones, machine learning, or something else. Larry doesn’t know. Zuck doesn’t know. I don’t know. But the race is on to figure it out. Trillions of dollars of collective market capitalizations are on the line. So a couple billion here or there is chump change. Except for the people who collect that chump change for selling them an option on the next thing. It’s real money to us.

I'm intrigued by the idea of a call option, I think it could be executed better than via VC funding though, Fred - now that would be disruptive

But I think Fred's largely right that Mobile was the last Next Thing - though strictly speaking its not "Mobile" now per se, but PC level processing power meeting Moore's Law and shrinking in size and price so it can be easily portable, with a damn good UI (think iPaq then iPhone). These "Smart" phones and "tablets" killed good old Planet Mobile dead in about 3 years (Motorola, Nokia, Blackberry - where are they now? They were earth shaking giants a few short years ago!)

Anyway, where is the Next Big Thing to be found is the question Fred asks. The future is of course here, just unevenly spread, so the trick is to see what bits of the future are here, now - and actually are going somewhere. Ten things that have changed exponentially in the "networked technology" areas we follow, in the time we've been writing Broadstuff (est 2006) are:

- Robotics (including the flying type)
- Data generation, usage and cost of processing it (aka "Big Data" - but I think the mpact will be felt indirectly - see this video by Phili Evans of BCG
- Penetration and usage of very cheap personal comms....
- .....especially those that are "Things"...
- ....and used to scrape data about "marketing value units" (aka people)
- WiFi Connectivity is increasingly ubiquitous, and whenever a powerful new comms system does that, big changes follow
- Smaller and smaller machine tools (including the over-hyped "3D Printer" but also a whole host of CNC tools)
- Games have moved from PCs to every device, and some games aren't really games any more as the principles move into other areas
- All manners of virtual/augmented reality devices (if Google Glasses don't make them irredeemably uncool)
- "Open" (ie other people's involuntarily exposed) Data - but sadly this will, in my opinion, probably be massively abused and then clamped down again, but its a short term shooting star.

As you can see, these are hardly New New Things, just things that were already here in 2006 and even then clearly had high potential. What's interesting is that they were all already on very predictable development vectors in 2006, but no one looked at them as killer technologies in those days. That was because at that time, their rate of development was still mainly all theoretical, and not provably valuable. To compare, here are 10 other things that were also floating around in 2006/7 that I thought also could happen sooner and haven't yet, but still may as they are all Big Next Next Things potentially.

- Widespread revolt against privacy-invasive free business models (it's starting now though)
- Modular hardware (Fred may recall Bug Labs from 2007)
- Open & portable social networks.
- "New" Search technologies (of which many have been tried over the last few years, a New New search hope appears every 2 years or so)
- Low cost and easy organisation of unstructured data
- Self learning software sorting out my media consumption, inbox and schedule (preferably materialising as a cross-media avatar with Marlene Dietrich's voice)
- VRM (Consumer to Business commercial tools)
- Effective voice recognition (the acid test - can it understand the Scottish accent...)
- And on that note, a near-real time "Babelfish" online service (to translate Scottish to English....)
- Various self-learning Algorithms that could predict things like the stock market, drive cars, etc etc

These are all here today, unevenly distributed, and still chugging along - but at slower rates than the various laws of networking, learning, Moores et al would predict. Typically there is a something in them that is missing, obstinately sticking at current capability or economically unavailable, awaiting the "key" to their leap over the Chasm. But all it takes is a small shift (think iPaq vs iPhone again) and over they go.

All you have to do to build your own mind-boggling portfolio of New Next Things To Watch is read the various Gartner Hype Curves for the last 10 years, and you will see a slew of things on the hot S curve one year and disappearing 2-3 years later. They don't go away though, and are still evolving in the Darwinian mud of technology species, it's just that something hasn't yet quite worked out for them yet. And somewhere in that stew already, are the next 10 New New Things.