The people who are offering the Zen-like answer ("the big thing that can be predicted is not the real big thing, it does not have true buddha-nature") are being a little too skeptical. Historically, there's been a fairly good record of people seeing "the next big thing" (NBT) a respectable fraction of the time, so it CAN be done, without 20/20 hindsight. Here are some successful big-thing anticipations that I am cherry-picking to illustrate when, why and how you can predict NBTs.

1. The moon race/Apollo was the NBT of its time and everybody knew it. It trained a generation of technologists and spawned a huge ecosystem of offshoots we use to this day.
2. Distributed computing was the NBT of the 70s, and Xerox invested in it for a decade to make it happen.
3. As the man told Dustin Hoffmann in The Graduate: "Plastics." Another NBT that plenty of people saw coming.
4. Container shipping. The entire shipping industry saw it as a grand vision that could change everything, and they just had to wait for the people with the right talents. See my review of the history of the revolution: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/07/07/the-epic-story-of-container-shipping/

What caused the early warning visibility in each case?

For 1, the science had been done since Newton, the basic feasibility had been demonstrated (V2s, Sputnik), and it was a matter of money. Once Kennedy committed the money, succeed or fail, everybody knew it was going to be the NBT for a decade and dominate technology.

For 2, many recognized that transistors made dirt-cheap Moore's Law computing possible, and as Alan Kay said, there was a lot that could be done by "wasting transistors" instead of viewing computing as a scarce resource. We focus on PARC because that happened to work out, but HP for instance, made major early NBT bets on hand-held calculators for the exact same reasons. They were a little too early in a sense, and many of the things HP worked on—such as hand-held devices and touch screens—are only maturing now, market-wise.

For 3, once nylon had been discovered and proven useful, the race was on given the supply of cheap oil (the main raw material) post WWII from the Arabian Gulf. It took genius to invent the first of the new materials, but once that was done, it didn't take superhuman vision to see that there was huge potential in a class of materials capable of competing with everything from steel to cotton.

For 4, necessity was the mother of invention. The demand was there, the concept had been recognized early on as a solution, and there were no obvious impossibilities. It was mainly regulation that slowed things down. Many saw containerization coming, and placed bets which paid off beautifully. That's how NJ killed NY in the harbor race.

On the Web, streaming TV was always going to be big... too many people had spotted the opportunity in collapsing bandwidth costs for it to not happen. It was a matter of timing and execution. Search was also anticipated (which is why investors DID get in on Google early). Facebook was slightly more surprising when it happened because the sector seemed to have been proven of minor value by Friendster, Orkut etc. Twitter (to me at least) was a complete blindside. I didn't expect anything like it. But I am guessing others did.

So the themes are what you might expect:

• a huge pot of unallocated money earmarked for an area,
• a game-changing basic technology that reopens many vast areas of technology/breaks assumptions underlying existing industries, or
• a problem with obviously huge demand that had no clear impossibility barriers (unlike say "anti-gravity" which nobody has an attack for, despite the obvious demand).

So where might you see similar things today?

• First, follow the money (healthcare, education are two places currently attracting investment).
• Second, look for unexploited recent scientific breakthroughs (this is why nano, genomics are so attractive... there's unexploited basic science there. Feynman said about the former, "there's plenty of room at the bottom"... costs are dropping faster in genomics than they ever did in electronics or video transmission).
• Third, follow contours of demand for which there is no obvious impossibility barrier: an example is the needs of retiring baby boomers. Huge numbers of people gradually exiting the workforce, healthy enough to do stuff a little longer, and hit enough by the recession that they need the money. Something's gotta give for the gray-haired and there's no obvious impossibility that says they're going to all have to starve to death. Also cleantech, since it is by now obvious to everybody that peak oil is approaching and money is starting to pour into alternative energy as well.

There ARE cases where the NBTs aren't predictable, not because predictable NBTs aren't available, but because even BIGGER NBTs appear out of nowhere and render the predicted ones moot. These are black swan NBTs.

One great example is xerography, the process behind photocopying. The idea truly came out of nowhere (dry copying on plain paper, based on an obscure physics phenomenon called photoconductivity) and completely disrupted the typewriter industry, with vast "typing pools" of working women drying up practically overnight, and the office being transformed beyond recognition.

Another blindside NBT was penicillin, which suddenly disrupted healthcare, since everybody at that time believed in the magic bullet theory (one medicine per disease) and didn't know what hit them when it turned out that one drug could fight a lot of diseases in "broad-spectrum" ways.

I have my own opinions about the NBTs of the Web and in technology generally. If you are looking for a single answer like "mobile ecommerce" then you are thinking about this wrong. Technology forecasting is a portfolio game. That's why the investment industry is structured around portfolios.

Whether you are an innovator, researcher, entrepreneur or investor, you need to have a list of potential NBTs with expected value/probability attached. Some hypothesized NBTs will be very sharply defined ("mobile ecommerce") while others will be broad ("something big in education"). And you need enough unallocated risk-taking bandwidth to jump into black-swan NBTs when they appear. And you should be doing some of your own original exploration in obscure areas to look for your own black swans.

You also have to ask yourself what YOU know that nobody else does. Anything broadly considered an NBT is not going to be a bargain to get in on, due to oversubscription (information spreads rapidly in an efficient market...). People mistake unexpectedness for big-ness because the unexpected makes a few peripheral people look like geniuses.

So pick your options, place your bets.

Twitter, Youtube, Facebook; these happened overnight and became very visible. They are the "company of the week".

My list is;

• Semantic Web / Linked Data / Big Data
• Machine Learning
• Natural Language Processing Technologies
• Military UAVs

I have been working with these technologies for a few years (except for military UAVs) and I do not feel ridiculous stating that they will be as important as electricity, radio waves and the internet, by 2030.

The military UAV market averaged 12 billion/year over the last 5 years and is experiencing over a 10% yearly growth. The market for military UAVs is already larger than the market for internet display advertising.

The change will not happen overnight, the change will occur over decades. The technology will come before the adaption of the social structures to the new possibilities. The internet went mainstream 14 years before the New York Times started losing money and firing staff to cut its burn rate. It will be many years before the internet kills off or substitutes for television and telephones.

Relational database and computing technologies took decades to defuse into the modern corporation and change its structure and function. The semantic web technologies are just an extension of these methods, but they will take us to the next part of the "information revolution" that started in the 1970s when the percentage of US GDP from information manipulation exceeded the percentage of US GDP form manufacturing.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I do not see many people in Silicon Valley innovating in these areas. Many of these technologies will require large capital investments and may not be appropriate for startups or venture backed companies to pursue until high level software libraries are available which reduce capital investment and development costs.

From my perspective, it does not even appear that the next generation of technologies have names people will recognize or understand until the technologies already have significant use cases and multi-billion dollar companies. After all, what is a "knowledge representation and reasoning system" or an "ontology"?

In 1994 people were asking "What is the internet?" and you would tell them "Its a network of computers" and they would not understand what the implications of a network of computers was. Saying "The internet is a network of computers" does not necessarily entail "In 15 years CDs will be obsolete, the existing news papers will be hemorrhaging money and television will be losing marketshare to internet video.". I remember people saying "The internet changes everything" and that is still the best explanation.

Today people are asking "What is an ontology" and people are saying "an ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualisation". The reaction is the same as when you would tell someone "The internet is a network of computers" 15 years ago.

Technology is called technology, because people do not understand it. People do not consider their cell phones or television to be "technology". The internet is barely "technology" anymore. I think the technology platforms are more important than the applications on the platforms. The platforms define what is possible. The internet, television, radio, electricity, mobile; those are platforms.

Twitter and Facebook are just applications. Twitter was successful because of the mobile platform and text messaging. Google was successful because of the internet platform and so on. Do not look at the applications, look at the platforms. The "next big thing" is going to be built on the "next big platform".

If you are looking at applications or companies, you are looking in the wrong place for the future.

We live in a world right now, which is of information clutter. Everywhere we turn, we get information of different nature, and substance. From Facebook to Quora - Do I care about everyone of them? Can you not show me what I really care for, otherwise there is too much to consume - and too many places to consume from.

We need to get personal, and understand what someone might be truly interested in. So, the next big thing is anything that reduces this information clutter and gives people something simple and easy to consume from all ends. So, when you sit down at the end of the day, trying to think what you assimilated through the day, it shouldn't be so convoluted but a clear stream of thoughts!

Atleast that to me is the next big thing!

I suspect "a" (rather than "the") next big thing will not be a Web Startup . It's possible the NBT could have a strong peer to peer component that either allows your device to work with other devices instead of a bunch of clients connecting to a server, or distributes all this cloud stuff beyond a relative handful of data-centers to millions of devices.

P2P has been around for a long time of course, and at least one hype phase, but it's had fairly narrow application such as file sharing and algorithms for things like content delivery networks and nosql stores. Herein, some themes to help explain why it could be time for a peer driven startup to do something cool

• Privacy. People are becoming aware of privacy concerns on central servers and social networks. Really. I think a lot of us in the tech community think users are clueless here, but people are controlling more and more what persona they expose to the world and the social services just don't have a good way for people to articulate social sharing and peer groups to extent I wonder if it can be done centrally at all.
• Communications. Vaguely related to peer groups, Skype being sold should help unleash some innovation in messaging and voice apps. Skype could have been so much more than a comms piece. Messaging is just begging for reinvention beyond what Twitter have accomplished.
• Lock-in. Devs are becoming more savvy to platform play and lockin strategies of web/cloud patforms (the Level 1/2/3 model described by Mark Andreessen still beats Iass/Saas/Pass for me). PSN and AWS outages don't help either. Cloud portability and data freedom are well and good but how do you port petabytes of data (in the future startups will have to handle hundreds of TBs to low PBs of _data_, not files)
• Resources. There's a metric buttload of compute and storage untapped on the edge that could allow for economic game changers, eg by putting cost pressure on models predicated on centralized storage and/or content delivery networks.
• Clients. Devices ("peers") are really good now. My phone has more beef than my first PC did, etc.
• Proximity. Proximity driven apps seem to be entering the hype cycle (cf Color). It's not hard to extend that to transient social networks (eg clubs/parties) and recreational forms of crowd sourcing.
• Fuddy old Networks ;) Neither telco or inter networks are optimal for pushing content around or data transfer in general; companies in both sectors behind the scenes recognize this, so there's an infrastructure play possible to re-invent networking and distribution for content.
• Technology hardening. P2P technology/protocols have gone through a phase of industrial use. Skype and BT clearly work at scale. CDNs and modern datastores indicate all those academic DHT tricks can work up to small tens of thousands of nodes without introducing supernodes/federations. Bonjour/Zeroconf work and indicate it's viable to create personal area networks without having done PhD research. The tech is proven enough such that things like Bitcoin are viable. Bitcoin, www.bitcoin.org, btw is worth checking out; it certainly opened my eyes as to what the art of the possible in P2P is today.
• New blood. This decade is the one where people who exited college around when the web startup move into management roles or actually retire, with them go their assumptions on how systems should be built. Heck, Facebook is nearly 8 years old now. A few years from now we'll see the first college grads and dropouts who whose web experience was formed with mobile devices and not the browser/desktop paradigm.

That said, it will probably have a web/cloudy aspect to it, maybe for analytics crunching or backing stuff up, and identity/payment is tricky (ignoring stuff like bitcoin), and I suspect a real world peer system probably needs supernodes, but the point is that the Web piece will not define to the app experience.

Some reasons it might not work out

• VCs don't get anything but web startups and green energy anymore and won't fund what they don't understand (Color gives me some hope here)
• Monetization of peer to peer apps is tricky, but there's got to be more to startups than ad based monetization, open core, and flipping!
• Bootstrapping P2P networks is very hard or requires the kind of spend on marketing/branding that we used to blow on servers ;)
• Somebody does something amazing on the back of machine learning beyond the usual classifier/recommender/clusterer stuff. But I think to really change that game means real time/one shot/reinforcement learners which have had niche field deployment.

Anyway, I'm sure there will be a Web 3.0 and it'll have good things like non sucking music apps, semantic/graph goodness, more real time enrichment/learning, etc. But I can imagine a Swarm 1.0 being more interesting.

Probably not any centralized social media app

Since most of the Social Media (almost all of it) are the centralized one, there is a huge amount of possibility that the next big thing after Facebook and Twitter will be a social media that is not owned by anyone, a social media that is totally decentralized, and controlled by no one. It will, of course, offer us the features and comfort our day-to-day app provides, at the same time with the efficiency, transparency, and offering of total ownership of data to its users.

Here are few Decentralized Social Media Platforms; I think could be the next big thing:

Steemit

Obsidian

Swappers Wall

Sapien

The unique thing about all the above social networking I mentioned is, that they are decentralized

Top Issues that decentralized social networking aims and are capable to overcome:

+ Lack of Transparency

In this generation where the Internet is growing rapidly and whichever organization controls it will basically control everything and can manipulate according to their needs & profits.

+ Ads

The most irritating thing on these social media platforms is the targeted advertisement ad that popup and mostly unrelated to us.

+ Privacy

Misuse & Abuse of Data, is so common with the centralized platforms, that now we are so used, but it can be easily overcome if we accept decentralized approaches for the apps and platforms we use in our day to day life.

I turned off my Facebook account a few days ago. I realized that I was not active on it for years. Twitter is also annoying with most people random tweets about nothing. I suspect in a few years something else will pop up. It's going to be different but not by much.

Not sure what the technology is, but the three markets that are crying for huge disruptions are education, healthcare and energy. All three have had plenty of investment to date, but need the kind of step function that a disruptive technology brought to scale would create.

Since education is my area, my guess on new things in our area which can change everything are either high quality learn-yourself systems like khan academy and/or hybrid systems like we have created which radically lower the cost of education while improving outcomes. Because all three fields are highly regulated, unfortunately innovation both needs to succeed on its technical and political merits, which slows things down. On the bright side, all 3 markets dwarf the size of anything else except possibly global finance.

In the ever-evolving realm of startups, it's always exciting to wonder what the next big thing will be. As we bid adieu to 2010, the dominance of Facebook and Twitter in the social media landscape is undeniable. However, the question remains: What will be the next revolutionary platform to capture our attention and connect us even further?

While it's impossible to predict with certainty, there are a few potential contenders vying for the spotlight. With the growing popularity of visual content, platforms like Instagram and Snapchat have emerged as strong candidates. Their ability to engage users through immersive visuals and ephemeral messaging holds immense potential in shaping the future of social media.

To stay updated on the latest trends and developments in the startup world, follow me on Twitter @smartney_wd. Let's explore together as we uncover the next big thing beyond Facebook and Twitter.

There are three main reasons why I’m betting on Quora.com.

1. Content: Quora.com has created a mediated space
between Twitter and long-form blog content. Twitter took away the need
to write thoughtful, long-form posts. But social media has created an
opinionated culture that now demands a deeper level of discourse than
140 characters. Quora has not only validated, but bought back the need
for long-form content. Because it is a very specific environment and
framework, it actually enhances the user experience by creating
mini-communities within one large platform. If Twitter is where we eat
pop-corn, Quora is where we go for a glass of wine and some debate.

2. Quality: I’ve never been a fan of anonymous
comments on blogs. It’s the same reason why I don’t trust answers on
Yahoo Answers and any of the other Q&A sites. Quora.com requires
users to identify themselves. When our personal reputations are at
stake, it brings out the highest quality of responses and opinions that
are well-thought out. What’s more is in most cases, these comments are
qualified because you can see who is answering them. A question about
AOL? No problem, Steve Case has answered it. I’d rather take his word
over someone else's.

3. Ease of use: What’s best about Quora.com is that
it balances all my interests and allows me to maintain with equal
importance all facets of my personality. I can follow Questions about
Creative Writing while I answer Questions about Social Media. My
home-page mirrors caters to my interests and as a result, I’m more
engaged and involved in the community than I’d be otherwise. There’s
also the possibility of making new friends!

Summing it up, Quora is intelligent, smart and just what we needed
2011 to be about. It’s interesting to have followed the trajectory of
massive social movements from Faecbook to Twitter and now, my bet is,
Quora. Not fair to compare these platforms as they are starkly
different, but I like how each of them serves a specific need without
overlapping one another. Absolutely love it.

The next big thing won't show up on this list. In fact, it'll probably take almost everyone by surprise.

If you're referencing Facebook, then sure a lot of VC's saw the very early growth and were tripping over themselves to invest. But the general public for the most part didn't see it as the next big thing ("how will it make money?", "what are these college kids wasting their time on now?", etc were common early refrains about Facebook).

A similar story occurred with Twitter ("it's just a fad", "this is like SecondLife in 2007", "what's the point?", etc).

Maybe the best way to tell something is the next big thing is either if it's being completely ignored (except by VC's) or if the general public simply doesn't quite get it. Because the kind of thinking that the public is on board with is probably incremental thinking, not revolutionary "next big thing" thinking.

Near-term: Personal Monetization of the Social Graph (sorry to use the "M" word). Groupon is close to this, but I'm thinking that super-facile, lightweight affiliate programs are going to be set up so that a simple link will enable others to purchase something you recommend, with you getting a small cut. Sort of like Groupon, meets the Amazon Affiliate Program meets the grandson of Amway meets Twitter. Might as well do something cash-positive with that social graph you've been building. If you build this, give me credit (equity not necessary).

Farther-term: Robotics. Haven't seen the beginning of this yet, except for the Roomba.

Long-term: Bionanotech. Think drug/machine pills.

I think the next big thing might be having Facebook style apps for professional purposes. Convofy looks as if it will be an exciting new tool that will be really useful for organizations to use to allow employees to share and collaborate online. Being able to annotate and share web pages in real time is an innovative and useful idea - probably not just in the workplace! I watched the video demonstration of what can be done using Convofy and can't wait until it's launched in April so that I can try it out. If you want to check out the video with Robert Scoble interviewing John Leckrone of Adobe Systems and Faizan Buzdar of Convofy, it's on Innovation Investment Journal:

http://www.iijiij.com/2011/03/23/maybe-scoble-got-it-wrong-and-convofy-isnt-just-the-future-of-work-08114#

- Convofy Preview by Convofy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkwzCr4t8PI

- Convofy interview with Robert Scoble
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHM8YzfDrTE

- Convofy interview with The Next Web
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1lRxXp2PYg

The next big things will come from new levels of thinking that address the problems that the current thinking behind the most recent 'next big things' has created.

What are the problems we have now?

(acknowledging that the current generation of social media has solved many past problems and created a new communications and sharing environment that has many positive attributes)

- The issue of privacy and users feeling like they are being spied on and that their privacy is at risk and controlled by the social network they are using is only going to grow in prominence. The continuing problems FB has faced resulting in almost continuous changes to their privacy policy and practice is evidence of this. The audience wants to share and connect on their own terms, not their chosen network's terms;

- Allied to this, social networks current business model of co-opting without reward (or, err, stealing) users' content, eg. Terms of Service that include abhorrent clauses such as "you hereby do and shall grant foursquare a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, fully paid, sublicensable and transferable license to use, edit, modify, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, perform, and otherwise fully exploit the User Submissions in connection with the Site" will not be sustainable - note by way of example of Foursquare had "irrevocable" in the above clause but have removed it. Users want to be in control of their own content;

- The growth of social search as not a replacement for, but more a complement and alternative to machine/algorithm search that recognises that the volume of content, primarily driven by the rising tide of mostly unusable UGC, means it is getting harder to find good content that is relevant to the user's need. The audience wants to connect with people and content they are interested in, and they want to do it easily;

- While Rupert Murdoch is leading the charge as poster boy for big media to start charging for content, the issue of quality content being recognised for its value and being paid for in some manner - for individual content creators, will become a bigger issue. We're starting to see new models emerge, including micropayment that address the fallacy of 'it must be free'. Whether you reference iTunes, App Store, Android Market, Kindle Book Market etc, there is ample evidence that smaller content creators, whether apps, music or literature can start to be remunerated for the value they create. Users will pay for content when it is valuable, scarce, highly relevant, good value and there is a mechanism that makes it easy to pay for;

Social Media 2.0 will address issues outlined above, and we may well see new models emerge where a set of digital life management tools that simplify and aggregate the numerous network interactions users have, while combining the people you want to connect with, with the content you are interested in.

Diaspora is a step towards addressing the privacy issues, other new businesses will emerge, mycube.com may be another.

It’s not a 2011 a long time ago, however, Facebook still remains quite popular nowadays. In my honest opinion, its days are near river now. More and more decentralized web3 social media networks are being built and they will become very popular soon.

I will explain why I don’t like Facebook. it’s one of the centralized social media platforms, which controls our private life. I honestly believe that FB and all similar enterprise-regulated platforms will soon disappear in the blink of an eye, they are running out of time and web3 decentralized ones will replace them. I like the concept of a web3 social media network called Solcial. It’s metaverse-like social media, where you set your own rules, you can monetize any content and it’s privacy-preserving and censorship-resistant. Sounds like a dream, but it’s a new reality. No wonder Mark will be one of the first users and investors)

- Information filters are going to become more and more important as the novelty of the Internet wanes, to be overtaken by more practical considerations. Social tools that integrate access to quality multimedia will continue to flourish. Anything that filters out noise and chaos will be valued (and paid for).
- Organizations are increasingly using these tools, and it's likely that more industry-specific social tools will emerge.
- More gated social communities are likely, like online dating sites, etc., and communities/social tools that are focused on particular aspects of one's life, like needing to lose weight.
- I'm waiting for the fully integrated physical/virtual social tools, like dodgeball. I've imagined a service for years that would allow a person to express interest in a person they see in public, minus the awkwardness. I've thought of it a few ways, from t-shirts that list one's handle or number, to pendants that glow different colors depending on one's status (single, married but looking, hook-ups only). I mention this because I think the boundaries between physical and virtual will continue to decrease. Friends will be able to send recipes that are filtered for my preferences then sent directly to the kitchen computer. Etc.

A better Twitter. If you asked this question 5 years ago it might have gone "What will be the next big thing after MySpace and Texting"?

Facebook beat out MySpace because they understood what was missing from MySpace - the value of a social network is in the relationships, not just commenting on each other's pages.

Somebody will come along and beat out Twitter much the same way because Twitter isn't adjusting their model to fit the space that they ended up filling. They started out being real time statuses for connected people, but became a force in social news because that's what the users wanted it to be. Most of the features, before they were features, were created by the culture of the users trying to get more from the simple platform.

But now that their value is social news and information, they haven't changed the platform to meet it. They've just added features - which adds complexity, and thus a higher learning curve to something that has always been "well, what does it do?" to people.

It's like a taxi company sticking wings on a car because its customers decided flying was better.

The obsolescence (senescence?) of search. What a ham-handed experience we live with today. Google and Bing do basically nothing to learn from my behavior and prioritize results accordingly, and little to present the results in an efficient or appealing or usable format. More importantly if they had this kind of insight on me they could anticipate 80% of my searches and save me the trouble. I look at every search as a failure to anticipate my needs and the primary pain/friction point in my internet experience. I'll be surprised if Google will be able to understand this so I suspect the solution that makes us all smile will come from elsewhere. We'll be looking at today's web like black and white TV.

Hunch when it will be very useful. Quora when it could be more mainstream. Both have all the social interactive characteristics . Just have to become "sexier" or at least more glamourous. Coming on quora has to be not only useful but fun.(and the opposite for hunch)
this thing could be huge ! like a Quora, more mainstream and with a funnier design http://www.vark.com
Passionating series from BBC on the Secret History of Social Network:
http://www.scoop.it/t/oups-i-am-wired/p/8418839/bbc-podcasts-secret-history-of-social-networking
Nothing is new.... Innovation is reinventing what is already there. like Music. The same notes since the beginning...and tone of innovative combinations

If the NBT will be both obvious in hindsight and difficult to see now, it's worth considering how computers and the internet can transform a new field of business. This is difficult to see, because so many of us have a tunnell vision at pure software startups, that only require a website and a server in the cloud. Few of us on Quora have any experience with physical production, so this would be 'unforeseen' even though computers have been steamrolling over old businesses for decades.

When you mention computers and production of physical goods, most of us will think of FabLab or 3D printing using e.g. MakerBots. [1] This promise a future where you print any product at home, as easily as if printing a PDF. Computers do however have a second angle of attack on traditional industry, which has been less visible:

Mass-tailoring. [2] In the late 90's, the internet was supposed to enable you to go into a store, have your body scanned and get the clothes of your choice tailor made somewhere in Asia, then shipped to you. The perfect fit and unique style of a tailor, but at a price range like H&M.
This never happened, but the idea is actually making a comeback, but with a twist. If factory machines and robots could sew a suit, from cutting the cloth to fastening the buttons, a European high tech clothes industry could start to compete both with the sweatshops of Asia on price and with your local tailor on custom fitting. The internet and customer base is in place, the barrier now is that robots can't easily manipulate elastic fabrics like cloth and leather.
Taking a cue from Quora User's answer, it's worth pointing out that the EU is willing to sink a lot of money into this and has already started a large research project on improving factory robotics. There's a large market for clothes and no obvious reason why robots should be unable to do what a human tailor does. When the breakthrough in robotics comes, this could be a NBT that venture capitalists focused on cellphones and social search will be unprepared for.

[1] http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128236.100-3d-printing-the-technology-that-changes-everything.html
[2] http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128200.900-fashion-victims.html