The 4 waves of the PC era - what's coming next?

I have been noodling for a while over this post by Om Malik: http://bit.ly/bNwuUP

WHAT’S HAPPENED? WHAT’S COMING?

I wanted to throw my own oar into the pond on this one, as it’s a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about over the last year or two, as we’ve turned our vague ideas about where “Apps” were going into a beta-product allied to a bold vision for the future.

You can slice and dice trends in many ways. The truth is there’s something fractal about the nature of trends - the closer you look at them the more they splinter into smaller and smaller fibres of subtrends, movements, products etc. People are eager to jump from the neatly titled Web 2.0 into something they can call Web 3.0 while labeling the dot.com boom some sort of Web 1.0. This is fundamentally wrong because the web was only part of why so many people suddenly wanted the Internet - indeed for most just getting an email address was the initial intent. All schemas to describe the complexity of technological progress are inherently flawed in their omission and simplification, but I have found it helpful is to think of four waves.

Why the games industry has less to fear than the music & TV industries, in moving online

I was intrigued by the title of this article - skeptical of gaming following other media online.  But I think it doesn’t follow that because the TV & Music industries have done so badly that gaming will struggle to find their feet too.

The reason gaming will work in a move online is that it’s gaming developers themselves doing it, the creative is moving online.  With TV and music big intermediaries sat between the creative and the consumer.  This made them slower to respond, more brittle.  They broke.  They were too slow to respond to customer demand and ended up losing control of the consumer (in music’s case to either piracy or Apple).

Is this the most exciting time for technology & startups in at least ten years, or what?

Just chatting with good friend and AdSemble CEO Matthew Olivieri, a smart scrappy entrepreneur who’s boostrapped his startup in the Digital Out Of Home (DOOH) signage advertising space.  They’ve got a great business model and have carefully taken the time to nail down the product/market fit before they look to ramp.

We were talking about some of the interesting developments in the startup world.  I couldn’t help but think, yet again, how lucky we are as entrepreneurs to be doing what we’re doing now.  Right now.  I don’t think there’s been a more exciting time in the technology industry for at least ten years.  Further, when you factor in the dramatic lowering of the barriers to starting up a company in many very large markets, indeed often creating new very large markets,  it is possibly the best time ever for an entrepreneurs and their emerging young startups.