Duncan Stewart’s Predictions At The Angel Summit

Today and tomorrow the Angel Summit is being held in Montréal and we have the chance to be attending. The highlight so far has been the lunch time keynote by Duncan Stewart of Deloitte Canada. He’s their director of research and co-author of the TMT Predictions. Those reports are usually aimed at the next 18-24 months but for this lunch talk he presented some of his thoughts on longer term change. Here are some of them.

Tablets and smart phones

Stewart is big into tablets and smart phones. He went through a quick overview of the evolution of the PC and claims (rightly I believe) that except for speed increases and various changes of the kind, PCs haven’t changed much between 1988 and 2008. They still work around the same old x86 architecture and with most of the same components. He gives his use of the iPad as a prime example of a huge shift that’s just beginning, how when he gets back to the office he’s in for a looong boot up while the iPad is almost instantly on, how most people can do 90% of what they need to do with an iPad vs a traditional PC. Tablets will (they already are) cannibalize laptops and netbooks, the top two hardware platforms in terms of market share and profit share will be the smart phone and the tablet, leaving desktops, laptops and netbooks as commodities and a slim share of profits. Since the money will be with the former, so will much of R&D and thus innovation. This is a massive shift in which platforms rule, which companies dominate and shows signs of not being controlled by one monopoly as the previous epoch did. (Really simplifying his argument here, hopefully the video will be available online)

Mobile networks

The major one in my opinion has to do with mobile and the future of those networks. Common wisdom has it these days that with network upgrades we will be getting ever more plentiful bandwidth and ever faster speeds, that we have a future of high speed to the palm of your hand and everyone will be watching HD movies on their phones. Not so according to Stewart. Yes networks are going to be upgraded –Rogers made some announcements yesterday actually– but some of the touted upgrades are actually already done and for various technical reasons, the last part, the actual over the air connection, can’t go all that much faster with those technologies. So yes, we will have faster mobile but the change will be nowhere near the massive upgrade 2G to 3G was.

Now comes the real problem; it’s expected that in 2015, there will be roughly 10 times more devices using mobile networks for data. It’s also estimated that these devices will use 10 times as much data as they currently are. That means we can expect 100 times more bandwidth demand on the 4G networks. According to the research he cites, the coming upgrades will come out in the end to about 16 or at best 18 times more bandwidth. Conclusion: the current mobile hell San Francisco is going through is the preview of what awaits us all, not a fluke. Since this is an angel conference the message was clear: re-assess your expectations if you are investing in companies betting on massive bandwidth and speed in the future.

Translation

Computer translation has historically been pretty bad. Babel fish is around 70% accuracy, using semantic analysis and trying to make sense out of the phrases in order to do the translation. Google Translate went the ugly brute force way and uses 43 massive data centers which simply index all the United Nations speeches in history, those speeches are perfectly translated in many languages so Google uses simple comparison and direct translation. It’s not trying to understand what’s being said, just find matches. It’s 91% accurate. Multiply the number of servers in coming years and the volume of translated data it bases its translation on and they’ll probably go up to 96-97% making that highly usable and allowing for on the fly translation of virtually everything we find online.

Quick ones (during Q&A)

• Biotech is not a disruptive technology. Ten years ago he would have said yes but now the industry has come to realize that making new drugs is hard. The “dinosaurs” were using hundreds of millions of dollars, taking years and years and coming up with incrementally better drugs that killed almost as many people as they helped (being tongue in cheek here). New biotech companies are discovering that they need to … spend hundreds of millions of dollars, take years and years and are coming up with incrementally better drugs that kill almost as many people as they help.
• Cleantech is disruptive.
• Invest in what he calls “Ratchet Technologies”. Techs which once you’ve used them, you never want to go back. Citing the example of word processors vs manual type writers.

Related posts:

1. Samsung Galaxy Tab coming to Canada in coming months
2. National Angel Capital Organization 2010 Summit Coming to Montreal
3. Accedian Networks Raises $19.5M in Growth Equity Funding Led by Summit Partners
4. Duncan Moore wins Web Award for Innovation 2010, £10000 prize