Ask A VC: What industries are ripe for disruption and why?

Brenda: What industries are ripe for disruption and why?  

For the first time in technology history, we have not one but five platform revolutions going on simultaneously: mobile, social, local, cloud and big data. As a result, nearly every business model and industry is up for grabs. The challenge and opportunity is that these innovations are not siloed but rather interact and accelerate each other. Social penetration and engagement is enhanced by mobile, data collection ramps more significantly with social and local data collected through mobile and pushed to the cloud. So, where's an entrepreneur to hunt?

There is a vast array of opportunities but I'll tag a couple:

e-Commerce: look at consumer daily behavior and re-architect the education and selling process to streamline the purchase process through mobile, social and use of data.

New media: Huffington was to papers what online video (YouTube, etc.) is to Comcast. Low cost of talent, production & distribution.

Health Care: big data meets mobile meets cloud. Direct to consumer preferable to long sales cycles to hospitals and docs.

Education: lot of money flowing here. Significant need, key is to find the logical entry points for new technology to create more effective learning methods and approaches. 

Sleepy analog industries: a favorite of ours. Combine innovative thinkers with domain expertise with strong technical team and go after providing transparency and choice to B2B customers while simplifying process flows.

In short, you have an array of unprecedented tools at your disposal to go after obvious but unaddressed issues in an array of industries.