Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has invested in some of today's most talked-about startups, including Slack, Buzzfeed, and Instacart.
Andreessen Horowitz has its finger on the pulse of what's happening in tech. Over on the firm's website, its investors have shared 16 trends and themes they're excited about this year. It's a sort of State of the Union for what's happening in tech.
We've compiled Andreessen Horowitz's predictions for the 16 startup themes that will be big this year.
Virtual reality
"Computer enthusiasts and science fiction writers have dreamed about VR for decades. But earlier attempts to develop it, especially in the 1990s, were disappointing. It turns out the technology wasn’t ready yet. What’s happening now — because of Moore’s Law, and also the rapid improvement of processors, screens, and accelerometers, driven by the smartphone boom — is that VR is finally ready to go mainstream," Chris Dixon, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, says.
We've already started to see the emergence of virtual reality: people are still excited and curious about Oculus, which Facebook announced it was acquiring last March. Microsoft and Apple are also reportedly exploring virtual reality too.
Improving enterprise software design
Andreessen Horowitz partner Scott Weiss says this is the year for enterprise to play catch-up. Enterprise companies need to get up to speed with consumer-facing startups, which have already created beautiful, functional interfaces, especially on mobile.
"Enterprise UI is woefully behind," he says. "All those well-understood motions that have taken hold from our everyday smartphone behaviors — pinch, zoom, swipe, tap, speak, even just moving stuff around with our fingers — have yet to take hold in the enterprise. The user interface has always been an afterthought, the last thing one did after building a database. That is changing now."
Machine learning and big data
Andreessen Horowitz's Peter Levine says we're going to continue to see big data as a trend this year.
"Where business intelligence before was about past aggregates ('How many red shoes have we sold in Kentucky?'), it will now demand predictive insights ('How many red shoes will we sell in Kentucky?')," he says. "An important implication of this is that machine learning will not be an activity in and of itself … it will be a property of every application. There won’t be a standalone function, 'Hey, let’s use that tool to predict.'"
See the rest of the story at Business Insider