It wasn’t so much the predictions as the discussion that was most interesting at last night’s annual predictions dinner, organized by the Washington Technology Industry Association. Will Twitter be acquired in 2010, and why? Who will have the dominant cloud computing platform in the next couple of years? What kind of startup are you looking to build or finance, and which areas are you staying away from?

A panel of Seattle-area tech entrepreneurs and investors gamely took the bait and had some lively exchanges over the course of an hour. OK, these guys all know each other, and we’ll take what they say with a grain of salt since it’s a public forum—but here were some of the most interesting points they made. (You can read more comprehensive recaps of the panel on Brier Dudley’s blog at the Seattle Times, and soon on TechFlash by moderator John Cook.)

The panel was split 3 to 2, with the narrow majority guessing Twitter will get bought next year. Andy Sack of seed-stage fund Founder’s Co-op predicted Twitter will make more money than Facebook in 2010 (surprising, given the current disparity in the other direction). Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin, an online real estate firm, said Twitter should charge for search (as it has begun to do in partnerships with Google and Bing). Kelly Smith from Curious Office and the startup Pressplane argued that Twitter could be “absorbed by a big company,” but “it’s going to go nowhere.” By the end of the evening, Sack was predicting that Microsoft would buy Twitter next year.

There was a consensus that 2010 could be a big year for acquisitions. Bill Bryant of Draper Fisher Jurvetson boldly predicted that Amazon will buy Netflix, Blockbuster, and Hulu, while opening brick and mortar “Amazon media stores.” Greg Gottesman from Madrona Venture Group said Cisco might buy EMC (for VMware) and Seattle-based F5 Networks, while Microsoft might buy Research In Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry smartphone. Sack predicted Adobe would pick up Seattle photo-editing startup Picnik. Rupert Murdoch (News Corp.) would buy Seattle’s Cheezburger Network, and someone would buy Redfin.

Looking back on 2009 for a minute, the big deals that were questioned by the panel included Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture (Gottesman said it just didn’t make sense strategically) and …Next Page »

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What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see? The Internet, television, antibiotics, automobiles, electricity, nuclear power, space travel, and cloning—these inventions were born out of dreams, persistence, and imagination.

What game-changing ideas can we expect to see in OUR lifetimes?

As each year winds to a close, John Brockman, a literary agent representing some of the finest minds in science and technology and the founder of Edge Foundation, poses a provocative question to an international community of physicists, psychologists, futurists, thought leaders, and dreamers. Brockman is a master convener, both online and in real life. This year’s annual Edge question, What will change everything?, generated responses from Freeman Dyson, Danny Hillis, Martin Seligman, Craig Venter, and Juan Enriquez, to name a few. Here are a few highlights.

Venter imagines creating life from synthetic materials and expects that our view of life, itself, will be transformed.

Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek believes everything will continue to become smaller, faster, cooler, and cheaper—with implications of an Internet on steroids and exciting new designer materials.

Several neuroscientists wrote about everything from direct communication of feelings and thoughts from brain to brain to electrical brain stimulation for the treatment of mood disorders to cheap cryonic suspension of brains to ways to control brain plasticity.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Verena Huber-Dyson see science evolving beyond analytical focus and including a sense of synthesis. Huber-Dyson envisions the end of fragmentation of knowledge.

George Dyson, science historian, author, kayak-designer, and builder, looks toward the stars, or here on Earth, suggesting, “the detection of extraterrestrial life, extraterrestrial intelligence or extraterrestrial technology will change everything.”

Discover magazine editor in chief, Corey S. Powell, offers a list of possibilities from synthetic telepathy to genetically engineered kids.

Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people.”

Tap your greatness as we welcome 2009!

Enjoy reading responses to the Edge annual question here, and please comment on the question yourself: What will change everything? What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?

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Last night, I attended an inspiring talk by Nick Hanauer of Seattle-based Second Avenue Partners. The venue was Seattle University, and the topic was “breakthrough thinking and ideas”—what they are, how to find them, and which companies have developed (and will develop) them. The event was organized by the Northwest Entrepreneur Network.

Hanauer knows a thing or two about business breakthroughs. He was the first non-family investor in Amazon.com, circa 1995. (Some nice nuggets from Amazon’s early strategy coming below.) He founded Avenue A Media in 1996, which was later renamed aQuantive and bought by Microsoft for $6.4 billion in 2007—Microsoft’s biggest acquisition to date. And he led an investment in Insitu, the maker of unmanned aerial vehicles that Boeing bought for some $400 million last July.

I’ll give a few highlights here from Hanauer’s talk, which he delivered to a jam-packed room of about 130 people. The start was delayed by a technical glitch in getting Hanauer’s slides loaded onto the right computer. (Insert obvious irony about a room full of techies.)

The key elements of a breakthrough idea, Hanauer said, are value creation and social disruption. “Value is difficult but possible to quantify—it’s the ratio of benefits to cost, divided by those of the alternatives,” he said. Benefits are things like a product’s durability, speed, and appeal; costs are things like price, distribution, and training. “Is this thing in some way 10 times better than the existing alternative?” he said. “No breakthrough idea has ever delivered less.”

He gave some examples. “Amazon offered 10 to 100 times the selection of any other bookstore, charged far less, and was much easier to search. It was the first real e-commerce business,” he said. “Insitu was started by some windsurfing freaks from Hood River. They were aeronautical engineers. They delivered 1,000 times the surveillance per dollar that Predator did.” Insitu’s UAVs were smaller, which made them harder to shoot down, and could fly lower, which made their cameras smaller and cheaper. They were effectively invisible at 1,500 feet, could read a license plate, radio it back to a base station, and locate it to within a few feet—all for $75,000, versus $10 million for a Predator drone. “That’s a transformational amount of value creation.”

As for social disruption, Hanauer gave a quick summary of what he meant:

—If everyone thinks it’s a great idea, it probably sucks.
—If people understand it, you’re too late.
—If people don’t like it and don’t understand it, it probably still sucks.

So entrepreneurship is a dangerous field, he said. “The difference between being an idiot and being a genius is very, very thin.” And keep in mind, he pointed out, “you can be very successful without being socially disruptive. Great fortunes have been made doing incremental things. Burger King, which came after McDonald’s, was not transformational, despite what they tell you…But they made a great fortune.”

Hanauer said the “most transformational idea” he’s working on right now is …Next Page »

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Map and list updated Dec. 19: Want to know where your favorite VC gets his or her morning latte? How about where tech and life sciences entrepreneurs gather to network and discuss ideas? If you’re looking to rub shoulders with the technological elite—or if you’re just looking for a quiet cafe to have a meeting or get some work done—you’ve come to the right place.

Here at Xconomy Seattle, we’ve been keeping track of the coffee hotspots around town favored by the tech-business leaders we talk to and write about every day. We thought it would be fun to share what we’ve found, both as a list and as an interactive map you can click around on (see below). In many cases, we’ve met the innovators or investors in their favorite haunts and sampled the local beverages. In other cases, we’ve gone by what they told us. But this is in no way a comprehensive list. We’d love to hear from you about where you like to go, where plans get hatched, and where tomorrow’s deals are being discussed. We’ll update the list as we go.

It may be cliché to say the Seattle innovation scene runs on coffee, but it seems to be true. One of the amazing things about the region is the sheer number of great cafes and places to gather, talk, refuel, and recharge. There’s something for everyone, from the quiet elegance of Caffe Fiore on Queen Anne Hill to the casual charm of Louisa’s on Eastlake to the hustle and bustle of Espresso Vivace near downtown. Not to mention the old reliables, Starbucks, Seattle’s Best, and Tully’s (especially on the Eastside—what’s with the dearth of independent cafes over there?).

View Larger Map

And behind every great cafe is a great story. Take Trabant Coffee & Chai, known for its strong espresso, tasty drip coffee, and spicy teas. The Pioneer Square branch is a personal favorite of Dan Shapiro, the co-founder and CEO of Ontela—and there’s an interesting reason why. In early 2006, Shapiro says, he was one of several entrepreneurs pitching their companies at a Keiretsu Forum angel investor meeting downtown. “We were singing for our supper,” he says. The guy in front of him was pitching a $12,000 drip-coffee maker, and he had coffee samples for everyone (Shapiro was too wired to try any). The panel asked the coffee guy questions like, Aren’t you just going to compete with Starbucks? Why wouldn’t Starbucks just do this? He replied that Starbucks’ leaders were too set in their ways, and the only way they’d do it is if they saw it in action.

The guy was Zander Nosler of the Ballard-based Coffee Equipment Company. His machine was called the Clover, and sure enough, he was right. His 11-person startup was bought last March by Starbucks, which now has Clover machines in several-dozen stores in the Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Boston metro areas. So what does this have to do with Trabant? The local coffee shop was a key early customer of the Clover, buying the machine in the spring of 2007. “Every time I go there, I feel like I’m supporting the local startup scene,” says Shapiro.

There are many more stories, but we won’t get to them today. Instead, we present our first pass of the Greater Seattle Coffee Cluster: an alphabetical list of cafes (50 and counting), and some of the notable people you might run into there. If you’ve got a favorite spot, or a story to pass along, please do comment below or drop us a note at editors@xconomy.com. Then again, you might want to keep your local treasures to yourself…

Belle Epicurean
1206 4th Ave, Seattle, WA
Recommended by Megan Muir of DLA Piper for its pastries, good coffee, and confidentiality.

Caffe Fiore
224 W. Galer St, Seattle, WA
Martin Tobias of Kashless is known to arrive for meetings here on his Segway. Also the favorite of Paul Thelen of Big Fish Games and Bill Bryant of Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Caffe Ladro
600 Queen Anne Ave North, Seattle, WA
Paul Thelen of Big Fish Games also lists this institution as one of his likes. …Next Page »

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It’s 10:15 pm, and Patrick Ennis is in a taxi bound for the airport in Delhi, India. He’s getting ready for a 1:00 am flight to Beijing. The streets of India are legendary for displaying 2,000 years of transportation history in one place—animals, pedestrians, carts, bikes, cars, buses, trucks—and it sounds like tonight is no different. “I learned to drive in New York, but this is much harder,” says Ennis. Though it’s late at night, he adds, “It’s still 10 times as much traffic as Seattle.”

Ennis is the global head of technology for Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue, WA-based firm focused on invention. He joined about six months ago; before that, he was a managing director at Seattle-based Arch Venture Partners, where he funded and built technology startups, many coming out of universities and national labs. And before that, he held senior positions in technology and business at Lucent Technologies, AT&T, and Bell Labs. He did his Ph.D. in physics at Yale, and did scientific research for about eight years before joining Bell Labs.

As we reported last week, Ennis is currently part of a high-powered traveling team that includes Intellectual Ventures co-founders Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung. They are on a three-week, five-country tour of Asia to meet with the local communities and launch new offices there. I hope to sit down with Ennis for a more comprehensive discussion after he returns, but in the meantime here are some thoughts he provided by phone—through a dicey wireless connection in Delhi. He touched on some details from the tour, his impressions of the various Asian cities (including the food), and how the VC industry compares with the invention industry.

Ennis said he’d been in Tokyo, Singapore, and Delhi so far, spending three to four days in each city. Next up: Beijing and Seoul. “We’re in the middle of our tour,” he says. “It’s going very well. Our focus on invention is being well-received here, it’s truly a global world now.” Ennis says that in each city, they’ve been putting on events where they have a reception and invite local inventors, university professors, and administrators of research institutions. They’ve also been meeting with local university officials privately. “We have an inventor network we’re building in Asia…We want to get to know the whole ecosystem…and we do presentations. It’s like in Silicon Valley, you invite people who are interested in what you’re doing, to mingle and network.”

Ennis is no stranger to Asia. In the mid-to-late ’90s, he worked in optical networking and sold a lot of products to Asian national carriers like Korea Telecom. And when he was at Arch Venture Partners, several of the firm’s portfolio companies had partners in Asia. So Ennis has worked in places like Taipei, Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, and Singapore. “A trend you see more is VCs, even if they don’t have formal offices or deals in Asia, spend more time there,” he says.

He didn’t give details of his meetings this week, but he provided some general impressions. “Asia is so dynamic in terms of growth, innovation, and optimism,” Ennis says. “The energy here is palpable, it’s similar to the energy that exists in places like Seattle and Silicon Valley, both in the technology …Next Page »

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Xconomy has just wrapped up its second month of covering the New England business, technology, and innovation scene. The paparazzi have thinned out. The VCs still aren’t throwing money at us (repeat after me, “It’s not a venture deal.”). But we have secured our funding, and we’ve had a lot of fun, met a multitude of interesting people and companies, and, we hope, offered a fresh and insightful brand of local business journalism.

We’re going to take a few days off, and then be back for more after Labor Day. But as we head off for the barbecue and to watch the Red Sox make up for the last few dismal days in the Bronx, we wanted to point out some stories from our first two months that you might have missed, especially those from our earliest days when only our moms and investors knew about us. These aren’t necessarily the most popular stories, therefore. Rather, they represent a cross-section of the editors’ picks for fun or significant stories that deserve another go-round:

Is Boston Underperforming?

Think Big. Collaborate. Media Lab’s Moss Says Boston Area Can Lead the World

When It Comes to Women-Owned Startups, Jean Hammond Says Boston
Investors Are Nervous Nellies

Biomedical Startup With a Twist and a Big Net

Something’s up at Sermo. Maybe CEO Daniel Palestrant Will Tell Us What it Is…

Our Leaders and Their Insights

The President’s Would-Be Pen Pal: Nobel Laureate Craig Mello

Clean-Tech

Metcalfe Takes Reins at GreenFuel After Key Setbacks; Company Lays Off Half its Staff, Seeks to Raise Cash

Ze-Gen: Waste is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Change the World

Entrepreneur Segways Toward Medical Revolution Directing Genomics X Prize

Getting Disruptive Ideas to Market

The World is Changing

Shopping 3.0: The New Face of e-Commerce

Fun Yet Poignant(ish)

Real VCs Aren’t Afraid to Cry: The Anti-Portfolio

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