The truth is five years of chasing down the social-local-mobile dream, tech startups need to encounter a paradigm shift and visualize another vision. Facebook has grown, and we really need to grow past it to see what lies in the future; instead of trying to adapt to the ‘me too’ culture that abounds everywhere from the world of tablets and smartphones to the world of apps, and that of social networks.

Startups are building the same apps, the same solutions, but with slight variations. And although areas such as energy, healthcare, and education are seeing the growth of a few very ambitious startups, technological advancements such as the cloud, big data, and daily deal sites have very little to do with them. As Time Berners-Lee noted recently, most of the people gaining an advantage from technologies such as machine-learning and big data are the ones buying consumer data, and not consumers themselves.

In the end, Microsoft, Apple and Google dominate parts of the internet, and everybody either wants to compete with them, or sell to them; and in doing so sometimes miss out on the big picture—innovation.

Where will this take us? Will the culture of true innovation actually ever come back? Only time will tell.