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25th Jan 2012
A year ago in Davos WEF participants watched as the Tunisian revolution spread to Egypt, fueled by the activities of the Egyptian people on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. A year later, Davos begins on the heels of the demise of SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act).
Joe Schoendorf, Partner at Venture Capital firm Accel Partners who backed Facebook says that when he looks into the future it s hard to underestimate the role mobile connectivity will play. Ten years ago we had a billion people on mobile phones. Ten years from now, all but a billion will be connected. And those people will probably be too young to hold a phone. You can t think of an area of our lives that won t be affected. The crowd sourced democracy we saw last week where the people said no to SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) that s because they had the power of the internet behind them.
Jobs jobs jobs are on the agenda too Schoendorf mentioned that in Silicon Valley, We don t have full employment, but we have the closest thing to it. We keep track of all of the jobs of our portfolio companies. Every time I look at it, the jobs go up. The jobs are good jobs - six figure jobs. But we re short of computer scientists, hardware engineers and good programmers. We are short of engineers. To say in this economy we need people is pretty extraordinary, and there are the same issues in biotech & energy. I ve lived in the valley 45 years, a lot of my friends are in Venture. We ve all got the same problem.
Watch the interview below for more!