Look out for doubling trends to find disruptors

Salim was the keynote speaker at the recent Reply Xchange event in London.

The Singularity University is built on on the idea that computing is getting cheaper and more powerful at exponential rates and this is having a huge disruptive effect on the world.

The University has schemes to try to harness this for good.

For example, students are challenged to create projects which will positively impact 1 billion people in the next decade.

“We are in a world of abundance,” Salim told the packed conference theatre. “There is a doubling pattern to many major technology areas, such as robotics and biotechnology, as well as computing.

“It used to take years to get to $1bn market capitalisation, now it takes months. The jump from linear to exponential growth makes business hard to predict, it creates chaos and amazement. The key is to spot doubling patterns early.

“15 years ago, all predictions of mobile phone growth were wrong by a factor of ten, they all forecast linear growth and failed to pick up that the trend was exponential.

“We could see the transportation industry going through that pattern, as it moves into being a more information driven service. 

“De-centralised companies, such as Reply, as positioned to be disruptors in this new space.”

Reply is an Italian technology firm with interests in many industries, including logistics, and its event is now in its fifth year.

Filippo Rizzante, executive director, Reply says: “We are a network of companies not a monolith, we are paratroops rather than a regular army.

“Most of the companies in our network are not acquired, they are incubated. The Internet of Things is key area for us and we have 20-50 companies incubating in US and Europe.”

The Internet of Things is expected to encompass 50 billion connected devices by 2020, and this figure is expected to rise to a trillion shortly after.