Web Still in Early Days, Tech Leaders Say

By Duncan Martell

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (Reuters) - The Internet is only in its early adolescence with a raft of improvements on the horizon, and the venture capitalists who helped fund the early boom are opening their wallets again, technology industry leaders said on Monday.


"I think the Internet's largest opportunities are in bringing new services, ones that we barely imagine, to billions of people around the world, wirelessly," said John Doerr, one of Silicon Valley's most renowned venture capitalists and a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.


"We're probably in the early ... adolescence of this Internet world."


Doerr spoke at a roundtable discussion of the TechNet Innovation Summit at the Mountain View, California, headquarters of search company Google Inc.(Nasdaq:GOOG - news) TechNet is a bipartisan political network of about 400 CEOs that promotes technology.


One focus of the discussion was new ways to use wireless technology to expand the Web. Wi-Fi, the popular term for wireless high-speed Internet access over short distances, is gaining traction and other wireless technologies are in the works.


"There are many ways in which devices are going to be connected," said Bill Joy, former chief scientist and a co-founder of high-end computer maker Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq:SUNW - news) "The thing we probably have not paid enough attention to is there are going to be many kinds of webs," he said.


In addition to the most prevalent Web now, which people experience using a Web browser on their personal computers, Joy said he envisions a personal Web, an information Web and an entertainment Web, among others.


He pointed to the introduction of Netscape, the first commercial Web browser, in 1994, as a "hit product" that spurred the explosion of the Web into a venue for social networking, commerce and information. Previously it had been used primarily for email.


INVESTMENT INCREASING


Doerr said that his company has in the last year-and-a-half invested in about half a dozen companies that are focused on delivering wireless services companies.


After the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, venture capital funding all but dried up. But Doerr said investors were ready to spend again, if not at peak levels.


"We've returned to pre-1999 funding and valuation levels for new ventures," Doerr said. "It went up by a factor of four through the end of the boom" from the pre-1999 levels, he added.


But while funding of new ventures and innovation continues in the United States, the world's largest economy is falling behind in turning out high-tech workers with science and engineering degrees, panelists said.


"We are not generating the engineering talent that we need," Joy said.