What's next? What new trends will emerge over the next five years to shake up the current technology landscape?

With no crystal ball of our own, my Womble compatriot Mike Gencarella and I did the next best thing and attended the Churchill Club's 18th Annual Top 10 Tech Trends debate between five leading venture capitalists held Wednesday, May 25 at the Santa Clara Marriott.

The discussion was lively and wide ranging with the audience having a chance to share their opinions through instant polling technology. The ground rules for the annual debate are that the trends not be obvious and that they have the potential for "explosive growth" within the next five years.

So what do the VC experts think will be hot and how convinced was the audience that they were right? It was interesting to see the wide range of opinions among the experts and how skeptical the audience was about many of their predictions.

Household robots? The audience put thumbs down. Health-activated individuals? Thumbs up on this one. Gene sequencing companies? The audience was on board . . . two to one in favor. 3-D printing? Not so much. A future untethered from the mobile devices? It's gonna take a while. For those interested in reading more, there's a good wrap-up of all ten ideas in Silicon Angle.

This year's top prediction (supported by almost 80% of the audience) was that "data is the new oil" and that a handful of large companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and LinkedIn which have huge data warehouses will drive innovation in the digital economy. I don't think anyone is going out on a limb with this trend, which seems well underway!

Predicting the future can sound like the stuff of horoscopes, and yet there are current patterns happening now which give us a good idea of what is likely to happen down the road; however, it's never easy, especially given the complex, inter-connected technology landscape we live in.

That's it for this month. Hope you had a great Memorial Day weekend. Back at you in June.

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