Janina Valiente was waiting at the bus stop after work in San Francisco last
week when a mugger snatched her handbag and then sped off in a waiting car.
All was not lost . Using a stranger’s mobile she called her sister, 450 miles
away in Los Angeles, who told her the precise street corner where the bad
guys had stopped to go through her belongings. Valiente called the police,
who sent officers to the location and arrested the men. Within the hour,
Valiente had her bag back.
Her sister was not clairvoyant. Rather, she used a nifty bit of software
called Latitude, a program that allows friends and family to track each
other via their mobiles. The robbers had no idea the Blackberry they had
stolen was a tracking device.
It is one instance of the impact technology can have on our daily lives. If
Valiente had been mugged just a couple of months earlier, she would have had
to write off her phone and the contents of her handbag.
Latitude was launched in February by Google – one of the stream of clever
ideas that seem to roll endlessly out of its Silicon Valley “Googleplex”
headquarters.
Google’s story is well known. What began a little over a decade ago as an
algorithm designed by two university computer nerds has become a $120
billion (£81 billion) corporation and one of the best-known brands in the
world. Today, it has become the standard by which all technology start-ups
are measured.
That is, until the “next Google” comes along. And there is no shortage of
entrepreneurs and venture capitalists around the world doing their best to
take that title. So who will succeed?
Nobody knows. According to Barry Maloney, a partner at the venture-capital
firm Balderton Capital, about two-thirds of companies that get investor
backing die before they even generate one cent of revenue. Most of the rest
wither away long before they achieve anything like their world-beating
ambitions.
“This business is like finding hens’ teeth. It’s what we do. At the early
stages, you really are just backing the entrepreneur and the idea,” said
Maloney.
Choosing winners is a mug’s game. And it’s getting harder. The credit crunch
has hit the technology sector hard. According to new figures from the BVCA,
the private-equity trade group, money raised by venture capitalists for
technology start-ups fell to £230m last year, down from £1.2 billion in
2006.
Below we take a stab, nonetheless, highlighting the areas from where the “next
big thing” may come, and looking at a few of the most promising companies in
each sector.
THE mobile phone has long been talked about as the next great frontier for the
internet. So far it has been a big disappointment. Tiny screens,
low-resolution displays and mobile companies too precious to let other
companies flood their networks have kept innovation at bay and services
basic.
However, the dawn of the smart phone, led by the iPhone, could finally push it
over the line and move the web off the PC and into your pocket. Their larger
screens, and hardware able to handle greater quantities of information, have
led researchers to conclude that within two years more people will be
accessing the web from their mobile phone than from their desktop computer.
Piper Jaffray, the investment bank, expects mobile internet search,
advertising and applications to be a $21 billion market within three years,
quadruple its value today.
Admob, an American start-up, wants to be the Google of this nascent market.
Only three years old, it is already the world’s largest mobile advertising
network. Backed by Sequoia Capital, the first investors in YouTube and
Apple, it places mobile ads and takes a cut every time someone “clicks
through”, much like Google does with search results. Last month it received
7.5 billion mobile ad requests, up from 2 billion in the same month a year
earlier.
Built-in GPS capability also opens an array of new possibilities for companies
such as Loopt, which has developed a “social mapping” product similar to
Latitude. The next logical step is location-based advertising. The day when
a stroll past Tesco will prompt an ad on your mobile for a special offer on
milk is not far off.
Games
HOW many Rox do you need to buy a packet of Moshling Seeds for your Zommer?
Don’t know? There’s a good chance it’s because you are either too old, or
don’t have young children.
Moshi Monsters, an online game for children in which they can adopt a virtual
pet monster and create a life for it in Monstro City, sounds silly. But it
is a very serious business. While the world fell into recession last year,
gaming geeks spent $22 billion on new games. Just over half of this went on
software and online games, 22% up on the previous year.
Moshi Monsters, created by the British firm Mind Candy, is one of a new
generation of games that has hit on a winning formula. It is free to play in
the virtual world but some aspects of the game, such as a passport to a
different part of Monstro City, cost money. It’s not a lot. The average
user, between the ages of eight and 13, spends about £3 a month. Or rather
his parents do. With nearly 2m users, that adds up.
It is a similar story at Stardoll, an online world aimed at adolescent girls
who can create an avatar and pay to accessorise her. Stardoll has more than
25m users. Ben Holmes, a partner at Index Ventures, a backer of the company,
said: “You may ask why spend that kind of money on something that is
virtual. But if you compare it to the amount of entertainment it can provide
relative to a Barbie doll you might buy in Hamleys, it’s actually very good
value.”
Investors are all chasing the World of Warcraft model. The subscription-based
role-playing game of warlocks and dragons generates more than $1 billion in
annual revenue from its faithful army of 11m subscribers, making it one of
the most successful media products in the world.
Processing the millions of micropayments, from 10p to £10, that these games
generate could also be big business. It is worth keeping an eye on firms
such as MobillCash, which was set up to process the tiny sums gamers rack
up.
Beyond cyberspace
LAST WEEK the surviving members of the Grateful Dead, the 1960s psychedelic
rock band, dusted off their guitars, combed out their grey ponytails, and
hit the road again for their first tour in five years. In most respects it
will be like most of the other tours the band has done over the past 45
years. Dead Heads, as their fans are called, will be able to get the
tie-dyed tour T-shirt.
They will also be able to buy a book, hardback and in colour, or paperback if
they prefer, packed with pictures from the show they have just attended.
They can even get it with a picture of themselves on the cover. And instead
of having to wait several months for it to be published, it will be
delivered to their home in three days.
Welcome to the budding world of self-publishing, where anyone can become a
published author for as little as £5. All you need is an automated book
design and layout program downloadable from the web. Blurb is one group
offering the service and is behind the Grateful Dead scheme. In two years,
it has printed more than 1m books, from eulogies for family pets to
high-end, hardback brochures for corporate clients. They are all available
on its online store. You can request a single copy, or 10,000.
It is one of an increasing number of companies that is using the power of the
internet to cross the line into the real world. Think of it as the
anti-blog. “There is something about a physical, tangible object that can be
shared that is different from a website,” said Eileen Gittins, the founder.
“As our professional and personal lives go increasingly online, there
is a real hunger to physically interact with something.”
There are other ways to bridge the divide between the digital world and the
real one. Poken, for example, has created a keychain USB device that allows
you to exchange your profile information from sites like Facebook with
people you meet socially by touching their Poken to yours. You get back
home, plug it into the computer, and your new friend is loaded on to the
system.
The distant future
WEARABLE computers; digital billboards that react to you as you walk past;
exoskeletons that would allow people to climb up a mountain at superhuman
speed.
They sound off the wall. But 10 years ago so did a mobile that could take
high-resolution video and provide a detailed map to your local restaurant.
So what is the next step? There is a good chance you may find it at the MIT
Media Lab, a research centre at the prestigious Massachusetts university
dedicated to the convergence of technology, media and the real world. The
aforementioned ideas are just a few that are being developed there.
Andy Lippman, associate director, said the science-fiction future is closer
than we think.
Consider, for example, the telephone. “Think about it. Remember when a phone
was just a phone? It was a great invention in 1875, but now it is changing
overnight,” he said. “If you distil the mobile experience down to the bare
minimum, all you are carrying is an identification card with a radio. What
we are building now is a system where the space around you responds to you.
So, if you are looking for the nearest bus station, a map of the nearest
station will blow itself up on the wall. That [sort of technology] is just
round the corner.”
And why not soldiers kitted out with exoskeletons? Lippman’s colleague Hugh
Herr has developed a robotic suit, funded by the US Department of Defense,
that can shift 80% of the weight of an 80-pound back-pack to the ground
through a system of tubes that run down the body to a pair of special boots.
A computer in the back-pack controls the whole systems. There are still some
kinks. For one, it severely impedes normal walking.
The era of the super soldier, it seems, may be some years off, but like
today’s mobile phones, its day may come sooner that we expect.
