Ask HN: What trends do you think will shape startups in the next 10 years?

Customer service is a big one. Buffer (http://bufferapp.com) is setting a pretty high bar with their Happiness Heroes, and even their founders spend time every week doing customer service. In a world where more and more processes are becoming automated, the human touch is going to increasingly become the differentiator: and if you execute well on that, people are going to take notice.

Example: Airbnb and photography. When the founders went to New York to meet their customers in person (instead of emailing them from behind a screen in SF), they realized that many of the hosts didn't have any good photos of their listings, despite the spaces themselves being beautiful. The guys took some nice photos of their customers' listings, and WOAH: they started booking more nights. Now, Airbnb partners with local photographers around the world to provide their customers with this service.

They started with a human touch that "wouldn't scale", and it's this sort of service that, I believe, will separate the startup wheat from the chaff.

-Docker and PaaS

-Bitcoin and the possibilities arising from currency as data

-Home automation/small sensors

-Pull based discovery through AI (evented ways to tell me what I want to know without me asking)

-Virtual Reality (for real this time)

I think that we will see much more interaction of companies with consumers in a way that goes beyond advertising. Maybe some people will get used to optimise every little bit of their time and life and others will opt out, or maybe both. Service needs to be provided to both sides. I'm so curious to see how Asia, Africa and South America will develop and what Hot Asia, Africa & Middle East Startup's we will see by 2022. I also think that people will be more and more aware of what is happening in the world and they will start to say themselves more often stuff like: If the government doesn't solve it, let's crowdfund it and solve it. I don't know maybe we can crowdfund Mozambique or Ivory Coast and get a week at a beach resort for our funds?

Any idea which destroys information exclusivity.

e.g. searching for houses online as opposed to offline eliminating brokers, destruction of politics and law in current form for smaller states with better control over resources, food recipe sharing, establishment of online communication forums for every industry, be it agricultural, scientific or cola production (whose exclusivity should end soon)

Increasing cost of transport driven by reduction in oil production. Force optimization of mass transport. Will force improvement in distance communication tech.

Improvements in food distribution driven by intelligent agents. Resource optimization at every level of community driven by smart agents.

As far as language goes, I expect local scripts to die out, replaced by the English script. Motivation will be to avoid reinventing the wheel.

- Wearable computers - watches, glasses, shoes, gloves etc.

- Massive amounts of data being spewed out of connected everyday devices - refrigerators, cars, etc.

- Curation of content - too much being generated today for someone to consume - photos, videos, news etc.

- Making content reach to the bottom of the pyramid - too much content being generated in english - it needs to be translated to mandarin, hindi, spanish etc.

Mobile computing, primarily but I'd imagine financing too. The combination of the two is scary; a huge market (5 billion plus) and relatively easy access to capital. (angels)