New York Tech Week was an absolute whirlwind meeting-of-the-minds at the center of innovation and commerce. Here are key insights from the event that will impact everyone tracking the emerging technology space today.
New Spaces: While artificial intelligence was the rock star of New York Tech Week, there are other critical trends to watch as well. Bontouch, a product innovation agency that specializes in iOS and Android development, design, QA, and data analytics, offered a discussion titled “Next In Tech: Where To Place Innovation Bets.” While the company touched on the state of generative AI and mobile, the stand-out presentation was on the latest buzz term, Spatial Computing.
This category refers to a wearable computer offering various planes or spaces, such as Apple VisionPro. Of particular interest was one the observations shared by one of the company’s executives who has spent time in Cupertino at Apple’s headquarters wearing and examining VisionPro. Bontouch pointed out that in 2005 Steve Jobs said that at the time there was no such thing as “headphones for your eyes.” However, in 2023 given the rich experience with zero latency and invisible screen, VisionPro now stands that statement on its head.
But we’ve seen amazing tech enter the market previously that suffers from lack of true mass adoption. Time will tell if spatial computing truly takes off as the next hot device, but if it does it will have massive earnings and/or impact potential in the following areas of:
- Entertainment
- Productivity
- Co-Collaboration
- Memories (think: your photos in 3D)
An important area to note is that all the apps that are available currently will be automatically available for access in VisionPro, so there will be a robust offering right from the retail launch. Indeed, the entire premise of the VisionPro as a device in the spatial computing realm rather than a place, such as with other metaverse-driven headsets, is an intriguing differentiator that could actually create a competitive advantage. Between this area and the impending advent of a wearable AI device, the narrative regarding the landscape of tech devices could prove to become quite significant.
New Mindsets: Navan, a company that makes business travel easier by organizing expenses travel & expense software for business travel, produced a panel on partnerships through an AI lens. Executives from the company exchanged points of view with additional executives from both Visa and OpenAI to discuss how critical partnerships will become within a faster and faster-paced emerging tech arena. Indeed, the panel concurred that collaboration and partnership is the new innovation.
One could also add to this observation the area of unexpected mash-ups, one-off alliances, and unique combinations in business, as well. Companies that develop roadmaps that not only successfully create strong patterns around agreements and goals with other organizations but also metrics will be those that win. It is critical for each company within a partnership to deeply understand its own core competencies in order to create a frictionless blend and a true value add.
Investors will need to evaluate CEO performance on this level because companies that create successful collaborations can move faster and more nimbly and, therefore, generate greater profits. This type of dexterity is critical because given that given today’s tech complexities, no single company can truly deliver massive value on its own.
New Guard: New players are arriving on the scene in new ways, and they are bringing new approaches to business within the emerging tech space. For an example, an event entitled “Underrepresented Communities: How Tech Companies Are Making a Difference” was deluged with a whopping 800+ people who RSVP’d. Co-organizer Billy Duc, CEO and Founder of JBI Software, said that the social impact topic of how technology can better support communities is becoming of greater and greater importance and those leading this mindset seem to be founders of color.
Founders themselves are also being supported in powerful ways as was discussed by the startup divisions of executives from NVIDIA, Dell, and Intel during an event during NY Tech Week as well. Chris Brown, Inception Program Partner Manager at Nvidia, noted that corporations simply do not have the capability to truly innovate at the pace needed for today’s market given their formal structures and approaches, so established tech players such as NVIDIA are betting on hand-picked startups in their programs to actually ensure the strength and expansion of their own products and companies by supporting early stages startups with the intent of maximizing efforts through exponential product growth or even possible acquisition down the road.
As Brennan Woodruff, co-founder of GoCharlie, Generative AI platform for creating content from its own models, noted after speaking on a panel on AI and Creatives presented by Mercury, part of responsibility as founder is to let people know that you are thinking about the hard questions and not afraid to answer them.
From an investor’s point of view, the key is being able to ensure the right questions are asked at the right time regarding early patterns and signals. In the Innovation arena, getting the balance right between what deciphering new information and critical patterns is vital.
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