After the Gold Rush

It's a pretty simple idea actually --- tie your IoT device to a backend service and never worry about competitors stealing your UI/design.

Case in point: the Nest Dropcam uses backend services to do image detection and alerting, two things which require skills hardware manufacturers often don't have.

It was a bit more than that: Google Video initially didn't allow user-generated content and when they did, the upload process was much more involved than YouTube's (largely because of fears of copyright infringement). They also had a much better embedded video player - I first ran across YouTube because all my friends were sharing it across LiveJournal, while Google Video embeds were awkward and ugly. And their whole experience was designed to get you to click through to another video - the YouTube founders themselves said that the site took off when they added the "related videos" feature.

But even assuming that it was all because of pirated content, that's a good example of an advantage that startups have over entrenched incumbents. If you're a 6-month-old startup and you get sued for a hundred billion dollars (and lose), you just go bankrupt and try again. If you're a 10-year-old company and you get sued for a hundred billion dollars, you lose a hundred billion dollars. The risk/reward tradeoffs are dramatically different.

After the technopolies will come the decentralized technologies like the block chain etc. Then we will eventually get a common platform built on things like an AST format (e.g. web assembly) with a semantic module registry allowing for creating interfaces across programming languages to integrate and evolve the decentralized tech. Then we will get into competing smart contracts and localized systems that limit company size and regulate social interaction via the technology. Then we will have superintelligent hybrid systems with features we can't anticipate now.

Heres one idea for such a business. Design and build some type of intelligent, networked sensor that gathers X valuable data.

Find a way to get enough devices installed in the right places by the right people, or better yet take to seas.

Sell your sensor network data, which is analyzed with some type of machine intelligence to make it more valuable.

The ocean is a rich place to find such data.

Low power computing + motors + wires + rapidly prototyped printed, or machined or laser cut parts + low cost sensors + web backends + newly accessible ai libraries = infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

We won't run out of startups like that until we're living on a fully networked intelligent planet.

I registered a domain last week directly from the registrar for $200 a year, which Is a lot for me. I know it is probably at least worth $1000 right now so I could get what I paid out of it at least. The point I am trying to make is that things adopt their real value, domains for an analogy are like real estate.

SF/SV/NYC/LON are very desirable areas and it takes a long time to build out that infrastructure. It is a supply/demand mismatch. Domains were these nebulous things no one understood but if you bought one, it was worth way more than you paid for it. However, JET.com and Genius.com were quite expensive because they are pretty desirable domains, nerdy.com just went for 25K. Supply has gone up so the localpetstores.co.com domains aren'rt really worth anything.

On balance, technology companies-- companies that are leveraging technology well and constantly improve as part of their business, will continue to do well. However, if you define technology as, with a computer then that sector is as descriptive as American or European. Companies in leveraging technology well:

Alphabet

Apple

FB (oculus)

Amazon

Intel

Companies often referred to as "technology companies"

IBM

Twitter

LinkedIn

GE

If you look at the highlevel descriptors, both baskets are fairly comparable, and that is the trap!.

Amazon has a globally unified distribution for digital media, technology applications, physical things, and a marketplace.

Alphabet.

Facebook has 1Billion users and owns much of the messaging. It is how people organize social search. They also are able to marry the phone messaging and image/moments, with the online community of the computer and soon bridge the devide to gaming and a truly addictive world of VR.

Intel is the world leader in building the thing every one of those companies runs on.

etc.

The mismatch between value and perceived value is becoming more evident. So it is, to quote our guy Charlie D, both the best of times and rthe worst of times, some have much infront of them and some have nothing, and the pundits will insist that it is a superlative of this or that, when in reality it is sameness: think hard, be more correct and capitalize on your view of the future.

edit: just to clarify, I plan on using the domain lest anyone think I am a squatter. Although, I do have a tendency to get sidetracked/change gears so I was using that as an analogy above.