The future

I recently got to take part in a nice seminar about the current and future stuff happening in the internet world and N. I can't remember the fine print of my NDA, so I guess I won't be saying that much about the N part, but sufficient to say that just as OPK has been drumming, there seems to be some sort of movement towards becoming an internet company.

Anyway, the most interesting parts of the seminar were when a couple of investment bankers (Mark Tluszcz of Mangrove Capital Partners and Doug Richard of, well, many things) took the time to come tell us about what the future seems like and so on. The general consensus seemed to be that in the cellular world (at least), the operators will be taking quite a beating and will become increasingly irrelevant. Perhaps not now, or not next week, but it'll happen as they will be reduced to mere bit-pipe suppliers, pushing one bit from one node (be it a server, a handset, etc.) to another at a time. VoIP, etc. Oh well, I think that this is nothing new, really, but it's always nice to be able to throw around big names to back up your views; thirst is nothing, credibility is everything.

Asides from the impending doom of the operators, the guys talked about some of the other trends, such as the fact that Google may have a tough time in the future, since even they can't beat search engines that focus on certain specific topics (e.g. real estate). I can see where Mark was coming from, but Google does have some advantages, namely the current size, the user base, the shear size of their bank account and the fact that they have the cash to hire the best of the best. But yes, I can see a small niche for specialized search engines, that's true. What else? Eastern Europe continues to remain strong, etc. And a comforting thing is that even though everyone else has slimmer phones than N these days, both Mark and Doug seemed to agree that N are the leaders in phones, thanks to the feature set and capabilities. In addition to the bankers, the same type of message was heard from Oliver of MobileCrunch. Comforting to know that even amidst all the RAZRs and KRZRs, N still seems to have a decent looking future. Oh, and I can also see why Mark and Doug are backing players that are bent on shaking up the status quo; they're both investing in small businesses and that's where the profit is at. If you can shake the foundations, you'll make a huge profit. So of course, as always, their views too are skewed a bit. But not as much as some, I would argue, since if you truly want to see the future, follow the money. And I'm guessing these guys have a couple of dollars.