Microsoft’s Don Dodge and blogger of “the Next Big Thing” and I hosted a call-in talk show today for the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council’s entrepreneurship cluster on exactly that topic. One of our key takeaways was that often the enemy is us in failing to build the next BIG thing and selling out too early. Here’s a link to the The Next Big Thing Podcast with Don Dodge.
On the call, we promised to post our top three “Hot” and “Not” areas for the next big opportunities in entrepreneurship and the results of an audience survey we did before the call (we picked ours before the survey, by the way). Here are our answers (apparently most of the audience agrees with Don; I’m the contrarian, for better or worse):
Don Dodge:
HOT: Local search, mobile applications, virtualization management
NOT: Linux desktop, video search, social aggregation services
James Geshwiler:
HOT: Speech/voice, social computing, multicore processing (runners up: distributed/portable power, robots)
NOT: Social aggregation services, mobile apps, virtualization
Audience survey, “HOTs”:
76%–Mobile applications
73%–Other Clean energy (neither solar nor wind)
67%–Solar power
65%–Local search
63%–Water
52%–Wind power
50%–IT Security applications
Audience survey, “NOTs”:
71%–Linux desktop
61%–Speech
55%–Video Search
45%–Social aggregation
Audience undecided:
52%–Multicore
