I always look forward to attending events produced by AlwaysOn. They do an exceptional job bringing together high-profile players appropriate for the conference subject, entrepreneurs, service providers and other interested parties.  The Silicon Valley Innovation Summit 2014 I attended last week was no different, but the devil was in the details.

Those both present and presenting were recognized tech movers and shakers—well worth listening to—the networking was excellent and I made some stealth contacts I’m not at liberty to discuss.

Subject matter centered on mobile any/everything, Big Data, SaaS, subscriber, consumer and investment globalization, which left me a bit disappointed even though big data is Quarrio’s ’thing’.

There was no mention of the tech I’m hearing/reading about daily, i.e., artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, etc., and the combination of these technologies with mobile and big data.

We all know that this kind of focus and talk follows the money, so I am left with a question.

Are the ideas being funded yesterday’s instead of tomorrow’s?

KG Charles-Harris is CEO of Quarrio and a frequent contributor to MAPping Company Success.

Venture Summit Silicon Valley 2012 really brought home to me, yet again, the importance of being in the “right” crowd in order to move forward as a startup CEO.  This event was packed with a mixture of entrepreneurs, VCs, angels, bank and debt financing partners and press.  All the things necessary to succeed.

However, one of the most important issues seems to be the ability to network.  While all the necessary people were here, gaining value from the experience was more related to being able to meet the right people.  To do this should be easy in this environment, but I saw a lot of people who had difficulty going up and introducing themselves to other participants, or who didn’t have their 10-second explanation of what their company does clearly articulated.

In fact, it was quite interesting to see how many of the entrepreneurs present had difficulty with one or both of these issues; to aggressively introduce themselves to others and who couldn’t smoothly describe what they did in a few sentences.

How is it possible to be willing to pay so much money to be in the right place and still stumble on the goal line?

The density of interesting persons was sufficiently high where this may not have been a significant problem, but as a startup CEO it is absolutely essential at all times to be able to say what the company does, in a simple and easy to understand manner.  Especially to people who are not experts in the area you are working in, which describes most investors and partners.

I’d like to laud Tony Perkins and AlwaysOn to have put on a conference that brings together entrepreneurs and potential funders in such an intimate setting.  The surroundings were beautiful at the Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay, the people interesting, and the keynotes, presentations and breakouts well thought out.

Mobile, cloud, big data, industrial internet – up

Social media – down

The most interesting aspect of AlwaysOn Venture Summit Silicon Valley was getting a perspective for where the technology industry is going and what’s being funded.  There are a number of major trends that entrepreneurs need to be aware of while building companies and investors have clarity around if planning an investment to drive towards a profitable exit.

AlwaysOn VSSV is an annual gathering of some of the leading entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley and beyond, focused on understanding investment themes and technologies that will drive the future.

At this particular conference, it was clear that one of the most important trends was the significantly reduced presence of Internet and social media startups among the speakers and on the panels.  The seemingly unstoppable social media storm has slowed down quite a bit.

One of the factors cited for this was that there was a saturation of these types of startups and another was that investors, having invested heavily in these companies over the past few years, were looking for investments with more predictable outcomes.

The effects of the GroupOn and Facebook IPOs (among others) resulted in negative investor sentiment toward these types of businesses.

So, what’s in vogue these days?

Mobile and big data companies seem to have taken over where Internet and social media left off.  The opportunity in the mobile space is a result of a movement that started about a decade ago when people moved from the desktop to the laptop.  The interaction with computers is now iterating to handheld devices such as smartphones and tablets, which are with us most of the time and collect data on what we do, where we are and who we interact with.

All this collected data forms the basis of the big data opportunity.  The ability to use this data to deepen our understanding of customers, manufacturing processes and many other areas has been a dream of business people, politicians and technologists for many years.

I’m personally very happy about these trend shifts.  Partially because EMANIO is perfectly positioned to take part of the development of this new industry of big data and analysis, but also because it has been difficult to understand the business basis of the social media phenomenon.

It has been difficult to discern a pattern for success within social media, but with mobile and big data this is much more logical.

KG Charles-Harris is CEO of Emanio and a special contributor to MAPping Company Success.

This is a guest post by Patty Block. Patty is working with me introducing Option Sanity to the entrepreneurial community.

Attending any of the AlwaysOn conferences is always valuable, obviously for the networking, but especially for the learning and GoingGreen was no exception.

If you are interested in what’s happening in green technology, Going Green was the place to be.

I met CEOs and entrepreneurs; heard about new approaches to solving serious problems—both domestically and globally.

The AlwaysOn Top 200 GoingGreen winners are good examples of companies that are taking a leadership role implementing eco-friendly CleanTech solutions.

From BigBelly Solar (eliminates the waste in waste collection) to Green Plug (provides a universal power converter…get rid of all those extra energy devices), all of these emerging companies are changing the way we work, live and play.

Congratulations to all winners. It will be exciting to see how the 2011 Top 200 innovations are adopted and evolve.

On a more general level, how do you get the most from a conference you attend?

By listening; stop talking, stop looking around and just listen.

Listen not only in the breakout sessions where it is expected, but on the show floor and in restaurants and bars when you are grabbing a beer at the end of an exhausting day.

Many attendees are so focused on talking about their latest ventures that they miss a lot of important stuff.

The best way to get someone to listen to you?

First listen to them.

Image credit: AlwaysOn

Last week I again attended the AlwaysOn 2010 Summit at Stanford, held at Stanford University in California.  It was a beautiful setting with people from all parts of the technology ecosystem—from very large companies such as Hewlett Packard to small 2 person startups, banks, venture capitalists, angel investors and consultants.

One of the most interesting takeaways from the conference was the very different views that people had on how the venture capital industry was developing in the present environment.  On the one hand, there were strong assertions that the VC industry was in good health and that there was a lot of money looking for investment.  Most of the VCs I encountered asserted that they were very much interested in early stage investments and that they provided a unique service to founders and early stage management.

However, this was in stark contrast to the intense frustration many startups were expressing when describing their hunt for capital.  They felt that VCs were far from interested in early stage investments and were mostly focused on follow-on investments in portfolio companies or syndicated deals.  Some (probably about 70% of the people with whom I spoke), who had received investments felt that the VCs were often a distraction on the Board and either were micromanaging or otherwise not helpful.  Yet these founders and executives have little choice but to continue to seek venture money to fund their growth.

Could these developments be due to the fact that many of those running the largest firms are no longer the seasoned operating managers that brought forth the storied companies of old, like Apple, Cisco, Fairchild Semiconductor, Silicon Graphics, etc.?  Many have the impression that the generation of VCs that joined when the names on the door wanted to kick back are simply bankers; portfolio managers unable to take risk or understand a vision.

The industry has always been prone to “herd mentality,” where a lot of VC firms invest in similar startups; as was blatantly obvious during the dot com debacle.

A preference for financial manipulation and unwillingness to take risks combined with a lack of operating experience and little vision could signal a death knell for the kind of leaps that created high tech in the first place.

The upside is found in younger VCs and angels; men and women who founded or worked in startups and are putting their money where their mouth is to help create the next wave.

The question is there enough of them or will it be a case of too little too late?

KG Charles-Harris is CEO of Emanio and a special contributor to MAPping Company Success.

When possible I prevail on someone I know to attend the major AlwaysOn conferences, usually it’s KG Charles-Harris, but more recently it’s been Chris Blackman.

Last week Chris attended this year’s AlwaysOn Venture Capital Summit at Sand Hill Road in the heart of VCland and got a glimpse into the future investment strategies of that storied world.

From Chris Blackman

What can put venture capitalists in a frenzied state? More money—raising it or losing it.

Was the mood somber, reflecting the fact that a huge chunk of available capital was erased when university endowments closed their piggybanks? No; the mood was frenzied at the thought of being able to raise capital once again.

Going forward, who do VCs anticipate will open the spigot for them? Sovereign wealth funds.

The other depressant in the room should have been found in talk of this year’s IPO market falling without a parachute.

Instead, a second source of glee is their belief that next year will be the year of recovery for the IPO market? Why? Because it can’t get any worse than this year.

This was tempered by the keynote speaker, Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital, who reminded the audience that, “VCs are inherently an optimistic bunch.”

Anticipation and optimism are all well and good, but does anyone believe that Dubai is unique amongst the rentier states—bankrupt?

There is a real possibility that sovereign wealth funds will need to deploy them to buoy their own economies, which will kill the buzz in short order.

If not, what if the SWFs prefer to sink their teeth into physical assets as opposed to swallowing more IOUs?

And there is certainly no guarantee that the money won’t continue to hide from the markets.

Videos from the conference should be up soon.

Click for more from the Summit and a look at how culture is faring.

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Image credit: AlwaysOn

Monday I introduced Chris Blackman, who attended the AlwaysOn GoingGreen West conference for us.

I found her reporting of the attitudes toward implementing renewable energy into the grid in the face of entrenched interests disturbing.

Fungible Grids

Will the energy grid replace existing sources of power—oil, coal, gas, and nuclear—with renewable energy? Currently, our energy is finite and polluting yet highly efficient. And all of the players in the market, producers and consumers, recognize the need to overcome these limitations.

Solar energy accounts for only 0.003% of energy consumption in the US today and that is projected to increase to 2% by 2025. That kind of miniscule percent of the overall energy consumed is not specific to solar energy. Wind, bio-mass and geothermal heat all give a negligible contribution to the US’s power supply.

The players in the market have one requirement of energy: it must be reliable at all times.  Oil and coal are reliable. And from what I could see at the AlwaysOn Going Green conference, oil and coal companies are not going to allow their market shares to erode without putting up a fight and having their case heard.  Chris Poirier, CEO of CoalTek, emphasized to the audience: coal in particular exists here in the US in abundance; coal companies are developing cleaner versions of this resource.

Much is made of “clean coal” but at the end of the day, clean coal is an oxymoron. Coal is a disaster at every stage of its production.

To mine coal, currently the companies raze our mountains to procure the coal. What they absolutely never want to discuss is that they are a highly subsidized industry: all of the energy used to transport the coal over vast distances is subsidized.

But probably the gravest problem of using coal as an energy source is that it emits more carbon dioxide than any other fuel and those carbons are much more polluting because the carbon molecule in coal is larger.

According to John Woolard, CEO of BrightSource Energy, the only way that we can overcome the limitations of going completely green and clean is if we take a localized approach to integrating the grid. That requires the grid to receive energy locally: solar power from Southern California and the Western states, wind from the Mid-West states, tidal power from the coastal states, etc.

That is a smart way of consuming energy. However, what do cleaner oil and coal have in common? The infrastructure already exists for these products. The grid already runs on oil and coal.

How will consumers and the US government react to the fact that this resource resides in abundance in this country and that we wouldn’t have to pay to overhaul our infrastructure to continue to use it?

For argument’s sake, let’s suppose that all renewable energies will have the same level of projected involvement as solar will in 2025, renewable energies would capture about 15% of the market.

Hopefully this is an ineffective way of looking at the situation as nothing is static and clean and green tech companies could possibly improve the amount of energy they generate exponentially in the future.

This all begs the question: can green and clean tech survive and even thrive without national policies to encourage their adoption?

I fear that due to the propaganda of coal being cleaner from the coal companies and the lack of capital investment and political incentives from the government to upgrade our infrastructure we will not replace coal and oil in our grid with renewable energies.

What do you think?

(Be sure to see what Chris says about water.)

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Image credit: LeoSynapse on sxc.hu