Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveils the iPad on January 27, 2010, in San Francisco. When I hustled out of CNET headquarters in San Francisco on May 26, 2010, and slipped into a rental car with two of my co-workers to head to a meeting across the Bay, one of them slipped me a copy of The Wall Street Journal and pointed to a headline that announced Apple had passed Microsoft to become the world's most valuable tech company. "What do you think of that?" she said. "Unreal," I responded, shaking my head. Just over a decade earlier, Apple had nearly been on its deathbed and needed a $150 million investment from Microsoft simply to stay alive. But then the iPhone arrived in 2007, and Apple rewrote the playbook on the mobile revolution.

An exciting convergence is happening between the physical and digital worlds. New innovations, from robotics and new materials to logistics and sustainability, are impacting our industries and our lives. The past year gave us a sneak peek of big innovations on the horizon. Yet, the most disruptive ...

An exciting convergence is happening between the physical and digital worlds. Trends from robotics and new materials to logistics and sustainability are impacting our industries and our lives. In this regard, 2017 didn't disappoint. SpaceX demonstrated their premise of reusability to make regular access to space economically feasible. MIT researchers created the first superlight porous material from graphene, and the US Navy 3D printed their first component for use inside an aircraft.

For this roundup, we talked to investors at eight leading firms that invest in a wide range of tech-related areas. Rather, the VCs told us that they're most interested in maturing, relatively safe investment areas. Here are their thoughts on the most exciting areas likely to get their dollars this year. The Human Side Of Algorithms "There's not a day or week that we don't receive pitches with an AI component," Barna says. "The thing we're interested in at First Round is, what's the flip side? What are the investment opportunities in human impact?…Not She points to personal-shopping service Stitch Fix, which uses AI to help stylists make more effective fashion suggestions for customers. Community-Based Businesses "It's pretty clear that people are dealing with the effects of digital overload," Barna says. "Too much screen time, and we're feeling disconnected because of it.