Churchill Club – top 10 trends

 May 2015 – The churchill club held its 17th annual spring dinner to review the top 10 technology trends for the future. The event held at the Fairmont The criteria for selection was the trends had to be non-obvious and be a basis for expolsive growth in the next 5 years. The event featured panelists : Bill Gurley, General Partner, Benchmark; Steve Jurvetson, Partner, DFJ; Jenny Lee, Managing Partner, GGV Capital; Rebecca Lynn, Co-founder & General Partner, Canvas Venture Fund; Shervin Pishevar, Managing Director, Sherpa Ventures; and Moderators: Rich Karlgaard, Publisher, Forbes Magazine; and Bruce Upbin, Managing Editor, Forbes.

Chuchill Club top 10 tech trends panel

The trends in order of presentation by the panelist, but in no particular ranking order were:

1. On-demand Ambient Computing – this is driven by AI
2. Traditional Banking will continue – the Bitcoin craze will fade and lose relevance over the next 5 years.
3. The Virtual Memory world – Data and sensors will know more about you and your habits than you do.
4. The Skynet Economy – the broadband economy will be based on the connected billions. This will include satellite connections to the population of emerging nations.
5. End of the Autonation in the US and abroad – US cities and suburbs will be redesigned away from single car ownership. This trend is driven by the assertion that the vast majority of millenians and Gen-X people do not see a need for cars in daily life.
6. The 5th mode of transporation will make and emergence and dominance. – This was referring to the Hyperloop transport system which was anticipated to displace communication systems and transport in developing areas and dense urban areas.
7. Reimergence of Women in Technology – this is the push to increase the number of women as coders and IT technicians which was purported to bring on the path to leadership in the technology industries.
8. Economy of me – with 4B people on line, web and mobile will replace brick and mortar facilities making space for housing rather than retail.
9. Rise of the RoboCars – urban autonomous vehicles will dominate all traffic by 2020
10. The mobile application rise will replace software as the “mobile web” will replace browsers as the primary interface – this makes the smart phone the dominate computing platform and mobile applications are the native interface.

The event had real time audience voting on the yes/no aspects of the trends. For the most part the audience was in agreement with the voting for the trends, the major difference was the audience’s belief that the end of the auto-nation was going to take more than 5 years.