What will be the next big thing and what will “enable” this disruption.  I will try to explore this in Boston this week.   Here are my notes as prep for what I think will be the ingredients of the next big thing.  I’d like to hear any feedback.  Thanks.

I am moderating a panel of venture capitalists in Boston at the Reuters Thomson PartnerConnect 13 (hashtag: #PC13).   The target Audience will be venture capitalists, limited partners LPs to the funds, private equity managers, and other professionals that influence how money is spent in the capital markets.

Here are my notes for the panel that is scheduled for 2:30 est.  Any comments additions or general input is greatly appreciated.

Focus Theme  of Panel: 

Introduction

We are living in a new era of computing that is experiencing accelerated change from old technology paradigms to new faster modern computing, software, and user/consumer technologies and solutions.

Disruption Trends:   Moving to a consumer experience and new business requirements for solutions on run on new electronic devices and networked physical and virutal environments.

Topics include: Cloud computing, mobile computing, and social/connected consumers and devices.

Companies like Apple, Facebook, Amazon Google, and new crop of emerging companies hitting the investment scene are examples of the disruptive companies who are the showcases demonstrating this transition to a new modern era of computing, software, and hardware.  All of these new emerging companies and entrepreneurs are pushing new devices, software, and hosted technology powering new ways to create value, generate new solutions and experiences.  This new modern era of technology is expected to power our world for upcoming decades.

We will explore this and more in the panel that will answer the question:  The Most Disruptive Technology of the Next Five Years Will Be … {fill in the blank__}

Moderator:

John Furrier, Editor, CEO & Founder, SiliconAngle Media; Founder of SiliconANGLE.com Media, technology and media entrepreneur covering all the action in the emerging technology and enterprise computing tech markets.   John is the cofounder and cohost of theCUBE a online video program that goes to the top tech events and extracts the signal from the noise.

Panelists:
Dan Ciporin, General Partner, Canaan Partners
Jeff Fagnan, Partner, Atlas Venture
Court Coursey, Managing Partner, TomorrowVentures

Discussion

The modern consumer, users and business experiences and expectations are now based on mobile devices running on the software as a service at new levels of performance and scale.  Cloud Mobile and Social is enabling  new technologies such as virtualization, big data, and flash memory are changing the fundamental nature of software and hardware thus changing the customer and business experience.

This new connected consumer/business  (social media, new communications) methods and ability to measure is disrupting all industries with literally a complete “process reconstruction” of existing incumbent value activities and value chains while creating new ones thus new brands and leaders.

Access to information, privacy, and augmented reality such as Google Glass all present these kinds of challenges and opportunities.

Topics / Questions:       We will explore some of these topics 

Technology / Enables for Disruption

• Mobile impact on the changing consumer and business experience and expectations
• Scale up infrastructure using commercial software vs. scale out infrastructure using open source software
• New modern hardware & software architecture:  Cloud – Mobile – Social
  • Impact to leaders such as IBM, HP, Oracle, EMC, DELL, Intel
  • Voice recognition, semantic technology, artificial Intelligence, machine learning
  • Virtual markets:  virtual reality, virtual currency (bitcoins), social spaces, apps, etc…
  • Virtualization, software defined infrastructure (datacenter), flash memory, and Solid State Drives (SSD) – flipping traditional software programming on it’s head; Memory no longer the bottleneck it’s storage; not the case in computing and software industry previously
  • What technology are businesses are buying to run their enterprise:  Traditional IT vs Modern Scale out;
  • Connected consumer – social media, new communications methods and ability to measure is disrupting all industries with literally a complete “process reconstruction” of existing incumbent value activities and value chains while creating new ones thus new brands and leaders.

Investing for Disruption:

• What strategies do you take to invest in disruptive opportunities;  Is there quantitative (data driven) or qualitative (gut feel).
• There always is a tension between investing in disruptive tech vs investments to make money; How do you balance the need to go for the new next big thing vs the pragmatic money making obligation.
• What are some of the returns and what should LPs and investors expect to see in disruptive markets..  no excuses.. results should be there… are the results not possible?
• How can venture backed disruption be a bigger part of the asset class for the big investors?
• Disruptive:  It’s here and now… Is it a fad or real???    The big whales like HP Dell Intel all retooling.. what does this mean?  Explain the impact on funding innovation and disruptive tech

Market Disruption Examples

• List a company in your portfolio that is an example of disruption and also name something in another portfolio (not in yours) that is another example of disruption
• Industries where disruption is happening:  Financials services, ecommerce enablement (from experience to payments),
• Perfect storm of innovation:  Specifically the state of business model transformation:  all theaters:
  • customer experience disruption
  • business model disruption,
  • product/technology disruption
  • economic disruption.