We are enthusiastic about the shift in enterprise computing architecture that is well underway. Enterprises are shifting from owning the technology to renting it. Companies in the past might have owned their infrastructure but in the future will simply rent the compute cycles by plugging into a cloud. Our portfolio company Parallels helps enable this could computing architecture. In a similar way, enterprises are shifting from buying licensed software to renting software on a recurring monthly license manner. The industry refers to this trend as Software as a Service and we believe we have among the largest SaaS portfolio’s in the venture industry.

Entrepreneurs and consumers continue to find new and better ways of using the constantly connected world of the internet to all their devices. Social networking companies like our portfolio company Linked In are allowing people to connect and trade information for professional benfits. However, with all this internet connectedness comes a loss of privacy and perhaps the challenges of having your identity compromised. So, new companies like LifeLock are emerging to prevent identity theft. We expect that in the years ahead more and more applications will be developed that take advantage of the constantly connected consumer.

The wireless community continues to deliver better and better consumer experiences with higher bandwidth, more applications, and better handheld devices. We are rather enthusiastic about the amount of innovation going on in the wireless world.

Silicon valley is tranforming to become the Green Valley. What’s interesting for us is that several of the clean technology markets are larger in size than the IT industry. The disruption in the clean tech world represents a once in a lifetime opportunity to change the world and also realize your professional aspirations. While many companies in this sector are too capital intensive to be commercial successes, we are enthusiastic about solar companies like Miasole and LED companies like Exclara.

Within our life sciences practice, we believe that the Obama’s adminstration support for stem cell research will allow for some interesting new life sciences platform companies. While the FDA approval process remains a key obstacle for any life sciences start-up, we believe that one area in which the U.S. and Silicon Valley will retain its competitive advantage is in drug discovery. The health care industry remains a mess. Just ask anybody who recently experienced it as a patient.