We're not out of ideas, not by a long shot. The reason you don't see any small companies working on something that looks like it'll be huge is that they all get

We're not out of ideas, not by a long shot. The reason you don't see any small companies working on something that looks like it'll be huge is that they all get gobbled up by the big boys. Examples: Rare earth magnets are expensive, it turns out that there's a hard to synthesize but quite stable and useful form of Iron Nitride alpha Fe16N2 which at working temperature, is more powerful than rare earth magnets, and is being developed in the US. There are folks here on HN who are poking around with ideas for tools that directly manipulate the tree structures that compilers build, to make far, far more powerful programming tools. There are operating systems that don't trust things by default, they could get rid of the idea of virus scanning everything by making it obsolete. To quote the old song "The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades."