… long live cloud computing. Technological cycles repeat themselves, luckily it is an upward moving cycle and not the other way around. A case can be made that “our hack” of using the internet to make social connections is not on the same trajectory. This post is not about Cambridge Analytics or Facebook’s abuse of Personal Data, but I will write about it soon. I have been rather occupied with solving the Personal Data decentralization problem.
Cloud computing is now the default technology for any software solution or software as a service, however with the proliferation of sensors into the devices that we wear, things that surrounds us and cameras that capture everything, the era of cloud computing is fundamentally going to transform given the amount of data that we are capturing. It is fascinating to be writing this post given cloud computing has barely made it to mainstream. That being said, it is not going to disappear but I do believe it is going to go even more into the background. Finally enterprises are going to start using the Cloud.
Watch this point of view by Peter Levin of Andreesen Horowitz.
For those thinking about the future this may seem obvious, but I have tussled with the notion of how should an entrepreneur take advantage of these mega trends and technologies? Typically it has been technologist who see the trend and frame hypothesis like Peter Levine has done and possibly venture investors given their agency model.
I like the above presentation but I am not so sure I agree with Peter’s heuristic on how to predict the future by looking for what is big today and just remove that, replace it with something else. I think it is a bit more involved than that. This march of technology, data proliferation and edge computing is an evolution. What is probably changing is the time between the technology cycles, it is starting to get shorter. We have the inherent need to understand the world around us and we are able to get much more granular representations of the world and of ourselves and the machines are enabling. We are seeing all this data in the digital dimension and that has just made the case for better economics and better technology.
Startup Iceland is around the corner and we are focusing on #Back2Basics and I believe the most basic fact about entrepreneurship is to see the opportunity. There is nothing more obvious and bigger than the world moving towards edge computing or decentralization. Don’t talk to someone from Google or Facebook or Amazon, they will tell you that they are the only ones who is going to solve this problem, I only say look at history. It has always been and it will always be a small group of people who envision a different view of the future and they go and build it. This is starting to happen in Iceland, I have been saying this for the past 9 years and I think finally it is happening right here in Iceland. The technologies that are pushing the envelop on decentralization and edge processing are Blockchain technologies, Internet of Things and yours truly Smart phone. The featured image on this post is the new IKEA Smart Lighting solution, it is only a matter of time before everyone in their home is going to manage their lighting using a mobile device.
