Friday, May 22, 2009

Skype spinoff a telecom disruption? - InternetNews.com

May 21, 2009

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- What's next in tech? For the past eleven years, the Churchill Club has taken a crack at answering that question with a panel of high profile venture capitalists proposing and debating trends as part of the annual Top 10 Tech Trends event. Last night's dinner event before a packed Hyatt Regency hall here covered Web trends, alternative energy and even a bit of hardware -- the latter proving one of the few predictions to be roundly voted down, at least from an investment perspective.

The hardware prediction was that e-reading devices, like Amazon's Kindle and future ones based on flexible displays are primed to take off. "Oh, it's coming, we'll all have one," said Joe Schoendorf, a partner at venture capital firm Accel Partners. "But no one [i.e. investors] will make money any money on them." Schoendorf and others on the panel agreed e-readers are one of many hardware categories that end up being low margin, commodity items...