I attended the Churchill Club Tech Trends Dinner last night.
Traditionally this has been a stimulating evening of VCs looking over the horizon at trends. Last night it was so boring that I left halfway through.
These guys sound like bankers and college professors reporting on activities that they are watching but not involved in. I think that the top trend is that VC is irrelevant. These guys are not doing startups so they really don’t see what is going on. Startups are getting the job done without them.
Thus, they seem to be struggling for relevance. For instance, there was much discussion of new category cellphones. Let’s face it this trend came from an outsider to the industry. — Apple. VCs and existing phone companies missed it. Roger McNamee and Elevation have invested to try and save Palm. I think Palm is hopeless. Jon Rubinstein (former head of the iPod division at Apple) cannot revive it.
Their take on data privacy and silos of proprietary data is a shrug. This is a huge issue for interoperability as well as privacy and their opinion was that “it will all work out.”
I agree with their view on the impact of new phones as computers to the third world, but this all obvious.
Joe Shoendorf made a big deal about a drinking water shortage as a separate trend from Global Warming. WTF? Have you noticed that much of the world’s water comes from snow packs and glaciers that are being melted by Global Warming?
This is pathetic.