Ask HN: What is the most important tech trend?

[cianchette]

I launched my first startup 6 years ago and arguably the most important trend was the adoption of mobile. I focused my company on this and quickly grew and sold my company.

Now I am trying to figure out what the most important tech related trend will be during the next 5 years.

Virtual Reality? Drones? 3d printing? Bitcoin?

[MalcolmDiggs]

If the FAA gets it's act together then drones (aka flying personal butlers) could certainly be it. The disruption they could bring to delivery, courier, security, tourism, gaming, etc could be huge.

Also, self-driving cars (if they reached a reasonable price-point in the next few years) could have pretty profound effects on ridesharing, delivery, parking, congestion, etc. Could be a major quality-of-life changer for people in big cities.

But overall I think the most-important technology will be batteries. Long-lasting, fast-charging, small, powerful, cheap, recyclable batteries will be crucial to so many hardware-based industries. They are truly the stepping stone to many futuristic tech-trends.

[byoung2]

If the FAA gets it's act together then drones (aka flying personal butlers) could certainly be it. The disruption they could bring to delivery, courier, security, tourism, gaming, etc could be huge.

All noble uses for the technology, but I suspect the most popular use will be to take better selfies.

[waterlesscloud]

In terms of self-driving cars, I think one of the major opportunities there is mobile devices, but in a slightly different context. People will still have their commutes, but now they'll be time to fill. Which will probably happen via mobile devices.

[onion2k]

Internationalisation. In the next few years there are going to be a billion or so new internet users who'll want content and eCommerce, but they'll mostly be on low-powered, low-bandwidth smartphones. That particular market is very poorly catered at the moment. There are some players out there, but there's going to be room for a lot more. Essentially the size of the internet user base is going to double.

[cianchette]

Providing services to the next billion internet users sounds like a big opportunity. I wonder if the solutions will be similar to what worked in the developing world or entirely new.

[byoung2]

I wonder if the solutions will be similar to what worked in the developing world or entirely new.

You don't even have to go to the developing world to find opportunity. There are services that exist in the US that simply don't exist elsewhere. One example is an MLS for real estate, which powers Zillow, redfin, etc. There are many developed countries that don't have one yet.

[MichaelCrawford]

Everyone is saying that Javascript is the world's most popular language, or at least soon will be.

That saddens me as I do not care for it at all. It's not like I can't learn how to code in JS, but to do so I find quite unrewarding.

I don't see 3D printing being commercially interesting for at least another few years. For anything you really seriously want a custom-made part for, you'd want a metal part made by an experienced machinist with a CNC mill. I expect 3D printers will get there someday but not soon.

Drones, quite likely there are many uses for them other than snapping pictures of white house lawn.

Bitcoin, maybe. In the long run, definitely. There is a specific limit to how many bitcoins can ever be mined. At the same time, more merchants are accepting them. Without a doubt, the dollar price of a coin will increase. I do not know yet - I haven't really checked - whether i'd expect bitcoin to do better than what I could do by investing in stocks, bonds or commodities, but in the long run I expect they would do better.

[yen223]

Unfortunately Javascript will be the world's most popular language for a long time, until the web moves away from browsers. Which could actually happen within our lifetime, given the rise of mobile.

[MichaelCrawford]

I should be clear that I am not by any means a language zealot. There's lots of people who like Javascript, and that's just fine with me.

For reasons I'll go into later, I just became a vegan. I've done it before, I know how to be a vegan and be happy with my diet. Tempeh is popular among vegans, but I regard is as foul, I'd rather drink sewage, but I'm completely cool with someone else eating all the tempeh.

What I like is to stress over cache misses.

[brudgers]

Distributed...PC's, "broadband", and mobile are early iterations of a ubiquitous computing mesh. This is not so much the internet of things but human controlled computing...that's where the margins are, not in industrial commodities. The next big thing will provide people with more computational power and more reach.

[walterbell]

What hardware/software platforms and network protocols do you envision for the UC mesh? Distributed gossip protocols or centralized named-data and content-centric networking?

[brudgers]

Keyboards.

[walterbell]

A UC mesh of ... prose?

[brudgers]

The infrastructure and protocols aren't the relevant place for innovation. TCP/IP wasn't the greenfield of money making opportunities when everyone started connecting to the internet. 3G wasn't the greenfield when everyone went mobile.

Look at tablets...they're getting keyboards as an upsell. They're becoming full computing devices. The cell phone companies' walled gardens aren't the future. Maintaining a walled garden requires constantly delivering features people really want. That's not a telephone company's core competency. They're future is in providing infrastructure for general computing. All they really want is mailbox checks.

General computing is better with keyboards.

[auganov]

From a mainstream consumer software startup's standpoint I'm pretty sure adoption of mobile is still the biggest trend. The last 10 years was about everyone starting to have "smartphones" and mobile internet access. Now it's about society adjusting to "mobile" and doing more with their phones. Just look at Snapchat, Periscope or how people use Messenger. We definitely have at least 5 more years of major innovation in mobile usage. I think we're only about to hit the "early-majority" stage.

[JSeymourATL]

A lot smart folks are trying to figure out the AI space > http://www.wsj.com/article_email/artificial-intelligence-exp...

[WestendITStore]

The growth of messaging apps like WhatsApp and WeChat, which reflects a preference for communicating with smaller groups of contacts more frequently, in contrast with the one-to-many mode of communication popularized by social networks like Facebook and Twitter

[akg_67]

Sensor networks. Interconnected intelligent self-adjusting self-responding devices. A marketplace of data generators and data consumers. Summarizing mountain of data, text, articles, detecting trends and responding.

[nealabq]

Group housing may become popular when we get AI surveillance that can watch over the common areas and identify abusers. But that's probably more than 5 years out.

[nealabq]

The car as a platform. Self-driving cars means cars will provide entertainment, news, and a work environment.

[lingua_franca]

Robots