Venture capital investment is springing back to life, and one industry insider has identified several areas that entrepreneurs should focus on if they want to attract funding. But given the fact that seed-stage and early-stage venture capital will be flowing to these spaces, it might make sense to target them with your venture capital job search if your background aligns with these hot sectors.
According to Gigi Wang, a board member at MIT/Stanford’s Venture Lab, these technology-related sectors are likely to attract funding in the near term:
Mobile location-based services. You’re probably familiar with GPS technology that works in cars and the great outdoors. But GPS doesn’t work as well inside buildings. Now, there are developers working on solutions that locate people inside buildings, a potentially useful application for emergency situations, according to an article in The Australian.
Predictive analytics, a second area gives website owners the ability to gather information about web visitors, crunch the numbers, and actually predict what their customers or visitors will want to buy next. Publishers, for example, could collect, analyze, and monetize data on what their customers are buying and suggest new titles. Predictive analytics is a particularly hot area in marketing right now.
Vision computing and video analytics, a third area, analyzes the data from each pixel in a digital video to identify patterns. It’s still in the early stages, but vision computing coupled with video analytics could help doctors identify patterns on x-rays, for instance, to determine whether there are tumors or not. It requires an enormous amount of computing power, and is a bit further out into the future for commercialization. Two video analytic companies in late-stage funding are Ooyala and Brightcove.
Unified advertising platforms. Advertising is increasingly going “multi-platform.” So ad agencies are searching for ways of running the same content across different media. The “holy grail” according to Wang, would be if a single ad could be repurposed instantly to fit different platforms such as desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones. It’s harder than it sounds, and so far no clear market leader has emerged in this space.
Are there any other tech sectors (other than green energy) that bear mentioning for those hunting for venture capital jobs? Add your comments below.
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