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The Future Is Now
Tech execs gaze into crystal ball at biz expo
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Business New Haven
10/30/2000
By: BNH
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In a panel discussion entitled “Future Shock” at the Southern Connecticut Business Expo October 18, top executives at three of the region's most innovative and fastest-growing companies agreed on two things: 1. The future is now; and 2. It is pretty shocking.
“A thousand years from now, [people] will look back and remember three events,” said Jonathan Rothberg, CEO of the New Haven-based CuraGen Corp. “They'll remember when man first went to the moon. They'll remember wiring the world [to the Internet]. And they'll remember when we took the human genome and used it to cure sick people.”
CuraGen is a genomics-based drug discovery and development company. In collaboration with other companies and through its own internal programs, CuraGen researches, develops and uses technologies based on the discovery of genes and its understanding of their functions and relationships.
For the event, which took place at Veterans Memorial Coliseum, Rothberg was joined by Susan Strausberg, CEO of the Norwalk-based Edgar Online, and Paul Sun, founder and CEO of DSL.net of New Haven. It was moderated by Richard Schultz, CEO of Metaserver.
Rothberg argued that science is at an historic “inflection point” similar to the discovery - which created the pharmaceutical industry - that most human diseases are caused by germs.
“For the first time ever, we can look cancer in the eye and say, 'This [genetic condition] is what causes [this particular] cancer,” Rothberg said.
“Over the next seven years we will see miracles performed in combating cancer, diabetes and depression” - three diseases CuraGen is working on drugs to treat.
“There are 2,000 places in your body where we can intervene against diseases,” Rothberg said. “We can look at your genes and say, 'This medicine will work; this one won't.' This breakthrough, he said, will usher in “the era of personalized medicine.”
Strausberg's five-year-old Edgar Online provides financial information including detailed U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) filings pertaining to publicly traded companies. In contrast to Bloomberg, which provides proprietary information to the desktops of financial professionals, Edgar's $9.95-per-month price for SEC filings in real time makes a wealth of data - from income figures to executive compensation - on public companies nearly universally available for the first time.
Strausberg said Edgar “has already made a significant impact on our industry by eroding [market share] of traditional sources of financial information.”
For her industry she foresees a future marked by consolidations. The most vulnerable companies, Strausberg said, will be those “that distribute opinions instead of “pure” information - e.g., TheStreet.com.
On the Internet, “The ad-supported model doesn't seem to work on its own any more,” said Strausberg. Companies will need “multiple revenue streams” to thrive and even survive.
In the near future, “No one in the world will be without Internet access in some form,” she said, and Web literacy will be “essential.” Because of that, she foresees the day when “Real-time online financial information will be everyone's birthright.”
It is people like DSL.net founder Paul Sun who are bringing that day nearer. For three years his company has been providing high-speed broadband service to small and mid-sized businesses in second- and third-tier U.S. cities, and now abroad as well.
Sun compared the impact of broadband to the invention of the automobile - “dramatically changing the way you do business, live or play.”
Sun recalls when he was in college, he used a 300-baud modem, “and I thought I was in hog heaven.” No more. In five, ten years from now there will be hundreds of megabits at our fingertips.
“We're just at the beginning of this industry.”
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