To augment my colleague’s re-cap, there was lively discussion about topics other than social networking and online advertising.

Overall, the panel agreed that tech investments would continue to grow its share of the VC investment pie. There is appetite to fund innovation at a secondary level vis a vis the assemblers and the suppliers of support systems and controls for improving the operational efficiency of alternative energy producers. However, this view is cast through a critical lens in light of the impact that legislation and political policy have on market growth and cost per kwH. The panel acknowledged utility computing as an overarching investment theme.  With datacenters springing up across the globe, SaaS and hosted offerings would fuel the need for applications to run, manage and support some form of virtualization.

Duncan, a self-proclaimed contrarian, holds a bullish outlook for the IT/Software IPO market in the first half of 2008. Since many other asset classes are approaching hyperbolic growth, there would be a subsequent decline. He asserted that investors would have no other place to invest their portfolios, hence technology, as an asset class would return to favour, albeit for a brief window.

Questions from the audience centered around thoughts about the future of Wimax. The feeling was that it was too far out, and that the carriers would not spend the capex. The VCs refocused on the continuing potential of Wi-Fi, despite failure of municipal projects to gather steam. Jim was rather excited about digital TV and companies that are looking to explore the potential between online content and digital TV.  Duncan supported this enthusiasm by reminding us of how small the antenna is for this type of technology compared to that of cable.

In conclusion, if you’ve not already seen this twice, I believe that this video best describes VC sentiment heading into 2008.