Richard Lide is like most successful entrepreneurs: always on the lookout for the Next Big Thing, and wondering how to give it the spin that will make it unique.
Experience has taught him that rumblings about the newest hot opportunities are almost always wrong. And therein lies the rub, for it is the elusive exception to that rule that fuels the excitement of the entrepreneur’s life.
The Next Big Thing, Richard Lide is convinced, is not going to be obvious; it is not going to resemble that Previous Big Thing. But maybe it will. Some prognosticators, for example, are forecasting that the Next Big Thing in computing will be The Fog, an enterprise computing platform that meets the demand for mobility, business intelligence, and real-time analytics – to say nothing of the vast tonnage of data generated by smart IoT clients and applications.
One of the things that he has learned to look for is patterns that enable him to predict where the Next Big Thing will emerge. But it’s a tricky business. All you have to do to understand that is take a look at old issues of popular magazines. Back in about 1960, the popular vision of the future – in the futuristic world of 2000 – indicated we’d be flying to work in jet packs, and have robots vacuuming the carpet.
Meanwhile, Richard Lide is searching for the Next Big Thing from his home in North Carolina.