Last night, at the latest Internet People gathering in Adam Street, I nearly killed most of London's netterati by inadvertently covering a halogen light with my neoprene laptop case. Fortunately I noticed the smoke and really horribly revolting smell before I did actually start a fire, but not before I'd burned something resembling a Martian crater into the case. Not cool.
Along with Second Chance Tuesdays, this is as close as London gets to Silicon Valley. A baker's dozen of techies and tech investors has two minutes each to tell us what the future of the internet looks like:
Angus Bankes, co-founder of Moreover Technologies:
It's crazy that we all have 230 different log-ins and that needs to be solved. The one big thing that is missing is the glue that holds everythign on the internet together. That glue is based on ID, a solution that will provide seamless access to all your sites and all your log-ins.
Sam Sethi, publisher of Vecosys.com:
Introduced as "the disgraced Sam Sethi". He agreed that federated ID will help to make the internet more valuable, but he also described the new attention economy. As it becomes easier to compile data on your own interests and online retail history, so we will become more savvy in sharing this information with friends and selling this information to companies.
Google, he predicts, will create something like "Google Personal Analytics" - only one step on from Google Trends, shopping cart or Google History.
Madhuban Kumar, advisor at Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures:
The internet won't just be on desktops and on devices, but there will be whole new applications designed for the internet on clothes.
Philip Wilkinson, co-founder of Crowdstorm and Kelkoo:
He talked about "try-vertising", where marketers will foster trusted groups of the most loyal consumers and bring them on board to test and review products through blogs, forums and so on.
Nicola Byrne from Benchmark Capital:
Globally, 1.1bn people are online but that is only 15% of the world's population. "The best of the web is hidden to the 85% of the world's population, including democratic journalism, for example, in countries that need it." She also talked of bring the internet back to basics, making it local and relevant to empower people.
Paul Walsh, CEO of Segala and chairman of the British Interactive Media Association:
Tim Berners Lee created the web as a mass interactive medium, but for that we need more effective content labels that enable more trust and more relevance for web content.
Paul Birch, founder of Cominded and co-founder of BirthdayAlarm:
We all know about social networking, aggregation and mash-ups but this will accelerate massively. If you need a business idea, take a good idea and copy it - look what happened to Friendster.
Something we're still waiting to see is a breakthrough social network for business, though he also predicts that social networks will become more integrated between our work and home lives.
Heather Hopkins, senior research director at Hitwise:
She's a self-confessed data geek, she says. Adult content's share of the UK web market dropped 20% between December 2005 and December 2006, she said. Gambling, the other original driver of web business, also dropped 11%. Adult has been overtaken by search, which was up 22%.
It's important to remember that these stats aren't about traffic though - this is the share of UK's web visits by category and as many more sites start up, you'd expect the share of adult content to fall.
More stats: News and media was up 24%, educational sites were up 18% though that was mostly the popularity of Wikipedia rather than educational organisations, which actually fell. Net communications and video sharing were up 34%.
The proliferation of adult and gambling content in Second Life and other virtual worlds could be a bellwether for where things are going.
Nic Brisbourne, a partner at Esprit Capital Partners:
After cutting up a can of Boddingtons, he said the future of the internet is about widgets. The internet is currently organised around sites but needs to be re-organised around people. He described this as "web atomisation" - we all have our own atoms of information and will organise the web around these.
Richard Moross, founder of Moo.com:
Moo are the people that print those natty little business cards from your Flickr stream, amongst other things, so it's no surprise that Moross told the group that the future of the internet is, erm, offline.
"All of us upload our content to the web but, as my um once said, if you love something, set it free."
He also underlined the importance of web ID and said that something like 80% of the top 20 sites deal with virtual ID and content in some way whether that's through photos, video, blogging or whatever.
Avid Larizadeh, associate at Accel Partners:
She reminded us all of net neutrality. Now that the Democrats control both house, there is more of a push to get these bills amended so that everyone will retain equal access to the web. Google, eBay and others are spending a lot of money in Washington lobbying on this and we should help.
George Berkowski, head of internet strategy at BT Retail:
He returned to the adult content theme: as the biggest ISP in the country, we know what you are doing, he said. Sixty percent of traffic on the network is P2P and 60% of that is porn. So there isn't less porn, it's just being distributed differently.
He noted wryly the launch of web TV service Joost which has the potential to undermine BT's vision service in the same way that Skype undermined BT's business previously. Joost and Skype are, of course, created by the same people.
If Joost can succeed with 1 minute of advertising per 59 minutes of content, it will be phenomenally successful.
Michael Smith, founder of Mind Candy Design and co-founder of Firebox:
Two minutes is not a long time to describe the future of the most exciting invention of our age, he said. But the future of the internet is simplicity. We have endless bells and whistles for sites and online services, but just because we can have them, does it mean that we should?
Think about Google's home page, and all that white space. Think about how Apple dominates the MP3 player market despite offering a product that is more expensive and has fewer features.
The future of the internet is simplicity itself.
