Sanjay Parekh

Chief Strategy Officer and Cofounder, Digital Envoy

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The Internet. Look at the SETI@home project. When researchers lack the resources to build a massively parallel supercomputer to analyze their data, people can donate free cycles on their PCs. Distributed computing is difficult unless you have a good medium that connects the whole thing.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Energy products.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

Wireless technology.

"For a long time I pooh-poohed wireless, because you can get higher speeds through a wire, and Wi-Fi had interference and bandwidth issues. Now, we're going to get cellphones that go Wi-Fi as well, which makes phenomenal sense. Why use a cellular network if you can use a data network and send voice over packets?"