Vivek Wadhwa: “The next Trillion Dollar Opportunities”

Ashish on April 20, 2013

(Opinions expressed here are my understanding of Vivek Wadhwa’s opinion)
“The next Trillion Dollar Opportunities” (in this decade)

China’s manufacturing and India’s call center business are saturated.
The PC industry is dead, Laptop is flat, and mobile is going up.

Next trillion-dollar opportunities

  1. Proactive health care
    Preventive care is much cheaper.
    Expect sensors everywhere (in the toothbrush, toilet, mirror, etc.) to give info based on spotted symptoms.
    IBM Watson is being trained on medical data.
    Soon, nanobots will go inside the body for drug release/monitoring.
  2. Manufacturing
    Robotics taking over (Baxter – 22K robot – will cost 1-2 $ per hour of work after that).
    Manufacturing coming back to the USA.
    America is being automated.
  3. 3D Printing
    Current 3D printers 200 (low end) -1500$ (high end).
    Expect prices.to go down to 200$ for high-end in 5 years => household goods can be printed at home.
  4. Finance
    Square-like mobile payments exploding
    Bitcoin carries a negative image, expect government-backed digital currency soon.
    mPaisa in Kenya –  60% of transactions via sms now (25% of Kenya’s GDP).
  5. Transportation
    Robotic drones going to take over for deliveries
    Self-driving cars are imminent.
  6. Computing
    Big data
    Internet-enabled devices augmented by high-speed internet (Google Fiber)
    New UIs – touch-based interfaces, augmented reality (Google Glass)
  7. Synthetic Biology

We are taking exponential (and not linear) steps in technology and humans are not good at predicting the impact of exponential changes.

Grand Problems

  1. Energy
    Solar energy is ~ 10, 000 times total human energy consumption.
    97% fall in solar energy prices in 35 years and it’s still falling, in 10 years, it will be grid parity.
    Solar is already at par with diesel prices in India.
  2. Water Shortage
    Energy is free => Water distillation is free.
    Dean Kaeman’s slingshot purifies water (it consumes less energy than a hair dryer)
  3. Education
    More education is accessible online now, tablets provide easier/better access.
  4. “In vitro” meat
    Two silicon valley companies working on that.
  5. Connected world
    Better flow of information.
    Helped in social revolution.

 

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