Pre-reality - beautiful, security - profitable

We recall the forecasts of the beginning of the year in the field of technological startups

An investor and a business analyst listen to pitches for the third hour.

“I need a simple business, no more complicated than a cheburek business,” the investor quietly tells the analyst.
- I know 23 varieties of cheburek with different USPs, what type of pasties are you interested in? The expert asks with a slight panic in his voice.

(A real conversation, overheard in coworking)

At the beginning of the year, the Andressen Horowitz venture fund published its corporate review of 16 technology trends of the year. In the forecast there are strategic ideas with potential for many years to come, and we analyze these cases in detail on the course of the School of Investments. Venture capital funds often avoid “long” projects, fearing too long a return on investment, or considering them not large enough for cash injections. But business angels, to whom the world owes the realization of many revolutionary ideas, can now find the startups mentioned in the review and take up their development.

Let's go over the forecast - after all, already in November, New Year's fairs are opening. How true were the venture shark forecasts?

Virtual reality

The most anticipated first item on the list. Most often in this context, it is customary to recall that in March 2014, Facebook bought Oculus VR, a leader in virtual reality. The press release on the purchase was enthusiastic, but just two weeks ago, Mark Zuckerbergpublished a low-key forecast that Oculus Rift sales will be exceptionally small. The inventors of technology rely on the mass use of the device for educational purposes, and hope to use it to return the generation of “visuals” to classrooms.

In the meantime, VR remains an attractive item in the list of services of advertising agencies. As the saying goes, "First, it's beautiful."

Sensory technologies in enterprise software.

The review noted that corporate interfaces are depressingly behind modern technologies and seem to have no idea what zoom, swipe, tap and pinch are. Tracking the performance of forecasts in this area is difficult due to corporate privacy.

Without a forecast, it is clear that sensor technology is primarily applicable to mobile devices. For large companies, this automatically means that sales representatives and customers will work with the application. There are a lot of agent applications now, but they still have to be customized "for the client." Therefore, the most promising will be an application that has already been sharpened for a specific industry. Must have for functionality in this case - the ability to work without an Internet connection, which, in turn, means the presence of a trading catalog adapted for mobile phones, plus a convenient update mode. Such applications can be a good opportunity for web development companies.

For information. This year, a major Russian building materials company has radically updated its distribution network. The first thing they did was give out tablets to all sales representatives.

Data mining, machine learning, big data

Taking this opportunity, we once again congratulate the Retail Rocket team on entering the international market. The successful development of this service fits perfectly into the trend voiced in the review: data mining ceases to be an autonomous function of large companies. Now it will increasingly be used as a SaaS service available to small and medium-sized businesses.

The main service of Retail Rocket is the intellectual selection of cross-recommendations for goods in the online store. The manager of the online store does not need to manually assign recommendations to hundreds of products. They are determined automatically on the basis of product data: description, characteristics, product category and others, and the previous history of interaction with the visitor: what products the user was interested in, what actions he performed or did not perform, and so on.

Artyom Kazakov, Marketing Director, Retail Rocket: “More recently, this technology was available only to large retailers (Ozon.ru, Wikimart), where there are special engineering units to support their own recommendation systems. Today this technology is available for any online store. ”

Full cycle startup

According to the authors of the review, this is a startup that offers not just new software, but a completed production and sale cycle. It is highly desirable that the product or service surpasses existing competitive analogues. The authors of the January review cite Uber as an example. "Bingo!" - we say in November 2015, following the rampant expansion of the service.

Data

storages According to the authors, not so much the storages themselves are needed, but software that will allow you to manage disparate servers as a single computer. In September, The Wall Street Journal announced that data storage projects were the hottest investment trend.

Digital medicine

The review notes that the driver of the changes is likely to be a mobile programmable record of medical data, which will collect diagnostic data and research results in a single repository. An example is Apple's HealthKit.

Now the global market for mobile health is estimated at 10.2 billion dollars with a forecast of growth to 23 billion in 2017.

Aggregators of goods and services

Yes, yes, you were not mistaken and your eyesight is right now. Andressen Horowitz venture whales felt that the hot trend of 2015 would be the creation of new eBay options. However, we are talking about the next generation of aggregators offering narrower, niche segments of goods and services.

Promising projects can budge, as a separate service, from the popular catalog category of an existing aggregator. Further, high hopes are placed on aggregators specifically for mobile devices. A bunch of new projects appeared in 2015 in the field of people marketplaces, online services for offering and searching services. The authors also consider prospective aggregators in the b2b segment - for example, for the rental of construction vehicles.

A good confirmation of the forecast was the information that the Craiglist bulletin board in 2014 doubled revenue to $ 335 million.

Security

2014 was not the best year in terms of security, the authors honestly admit. Mention Sony leak  , unveiling  personal photos of nude celebrities, and stealing information from Target. If you remember, in January 2014, 110 million bank cards were stolen from Target using the Kaptoxa virus written by a Russian teenager. Interestingly, Target has previously become a byword in the field of customer data processing and Data Mining. What is the story of an American schoolgirl whose pregnancy Target learned earlier than her dad. As they say - we mined, mined, and finally mined.

The global cybersecurity software market in 2015 amounted to $ 75 billion, and by 2020 it is expected to grow to 175 billion.

Bitcoin

You ordered pizza on May 22? Five years ago that day, a Florida programmer, Laszlo Hanic, made the first ever purchase for bitcoin. He bought two pizzas for 10,000 BTC, which is about $ 2.4 million at the exchange rate on May 22, 2015. Articles on this subject appear with a certain mysterious frequency for a long time. In a 2013 publication , the notorious pizza was worth $ 5 million. The authors of the review believe that the creation of infrastructure applications for Bitcoin may be promising.

True, in Russia they are trying to ban bitcoins, and in China banking operations have already been banned with them.

Soft "Cloud - Client"

It’s not enough to write another application to draw a Gantt chart in Bitrix24. In general, it is not enough just to customize the cloud service for the client. Tomorrow there will be a demand for a service that will transfer part of cloud computing to local devices, including smartphones. Indeed, in the world there are many places where the price of Internet access is higher than a mobile phone.

Crowdfunding

A great way to raise 23 thousand dollars for making a portion of potato salad . The authors of the review recall the potential of the idea of ​​crowdfunding and note that applications on this topic are in demand in local communities and other social circles. The goal may be not only fundraising, but also the collection of information, the organization of events and meetings.

Money, as a universal meter, should not be forgotten either. In 2014, the crowdfunding market expanded by 167% by 2013 and “raised” $ 16.2 billion in donations, and in 2015 it is expected to reach 34.4 billion.

Internet of Things

The authors supported the general trend and added Internet of things to the review. Smart refrigerators, smart microwaves with or without RFID chips, telling the owner that the pie is ready, but the chicken on the second shelf will soon go bad. What is most welcome in this area is not sparkling new objects with built-in gadgets, but the ability to include old, but high-quality and well-functioning equipment in the Internet of things.

The cafe owner cannot buy a new refrigerator, but he also needs to know that someone has loosely closed the door in it.

Monetization of online video

Jeff Jordan from Andressen Horowitz in January 2015 expected YouTube to open up additional advertising opportunities, and new video services would be no less popular than already promoted ones. Recall that just a couple of months ago, Youtube offered contextual advertising in the search results, a media advertisement appeared on the Vkontakte network player, and the ivi.ru online cinema moved up to third place in the Russian ranking of startups according to Startupranking.com.

Great job, Jeff!

Insurance

In the face of the crisis, business and risk insurance is gaining a second wind. Of course, insurance companies understand this very well. Therefore, they will seek new solutions to simplify the purchase of insurance and interaction with customers, to more carefully assess their own risks, and quickly pool their capital if large payments are necessary.

DevOps

The abbreviation DevOp is derived from the abbreviation "developer" and "operations". No, that you, this does not mean that the system administrator must be able to write sites. For now. The authors of the review wanted to say that developers should focus on writing applications that ensure stability and high performance of the entire system, including server and / or cloud elements.

Fail fast

Part religious, final. It quotes Mark Andressen, the famous twitter provocateur and co-founder of Andressen Horowitz: “The goal is not to hold out as long as possible before the failure. The goal is to be successful over a long period of time. ”

Whatever it means.

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