Maybe it had something to do with SXSW Interactive, the big technology fair in Texas, but the most overused word this month was "startup". I'm getting bored of reading about 18-year-old kids who become millionaires overnight when some investor pumps a fortune into their app, or their telemetric ankle bracelet, or their pizza delivery drone. Apparently, a lot of tech-minded school kids in the US don't plan on going to university because they want to focus on their startup. But I'm not sure that's a good idea. Because you know what this reminds me of? The dotcom bubble. That's right - apps are the new dotcoms.
Pretty soon, I think, investors will realise that we only ever use three of the apps on our phones. The rest we play with for a week and then forget. So they just sit there, silently gathering data. When the app bubble bursts, many investors may find they've just poured money into the equivalent of pets.com. And as the money dries up, perhaps the tech teens will stop coding and learn how to read, paint, or appreciate nature. Actually, we could use their help to save the planet. Data doesn't float in The Cloud, it sits on big energy-sucking, earth polluting data centres - row upon row of servers. In Silicon Valley, these appear on the area's Toxic Air Contaminant Inventory. So let's stop encouraging the geeks. Until my kid gets rich, of course.
