Lux Research has put together a group of cutting-edge emerging technology companies to watch in 2013, mostly energy tech.
1).Beta Renewables
: A $350 million joint venture between Gruppo Mossi & Ghisolfi and TPG, Italian company Beta Renewables is scaling up a commercial cellulosic ethanol factory, which it began operating in the fourth quarter of 2012 in Italy. The plant is supposed to eventually make 20 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol per year, starting from an initial volume of 40,000 tons. Beta Renewables uses enzymes to break down non-food biomass and then uses a fermentation process to turn it into biofuels.
Lately I’ve been following heavily the start-up community, getting involved in the Miami startup movement
, advising and mentoring - but ultimately, it’s a lean/mean innovation machine, indicator of future experiences, and there are great opportunities to marry the start-up and agency world :: innovation + story telling + brands.
Here’s a shortlist of trends to follow in 2013.
1- Cloud infrastructure SaaS & Security
This trend is not new, but I think it is cyclical, and the first wave has faded out in 2011. Cloud services is the fastest growing web hosting product at the moment, cloud services is said to reach a market value of $48bn, some say 10% of all IT spendings will be made in cloud services; the trend is clearly going up and not planning on decelerating in the next 5-10 years.
Why a trend in 2013?, Github still growing, Google Cloud introduced earlier this year to compete with Amazon Web Services, Amazon lowering prices, introducing big-data services, more companies have a foot in the cloud and services are getting cheaper and easier to scale than dedicated or VPS hosting. And with a new generation of companies in this sector, 2013 will make it hot again.
Cloud is becoming ubiquitous, now having storage, computing, backups, big data analysis and processing, data collection and aggregation, communications - you name it. It’s making it easier and easier for startups and connect the dots, wire core services together, and form a new innovative service. Cloud is making it easier than ever to fulfill the tech stack of any startup, allowing [the few who can] to focus on the business.