In VentureBeat this morning, Ron Conway, one of the most successful Internet company investors, puts a stake in the ground and predicts that “real-time” will be the next explosive investment sector. He says “the market will experience astronomic growth and a value reaching at least a billion dollars within three years.” He has even re-focused his fund and adds that they “expect to make 40 to 50 new company investments over the next 18 months, with the primary focus on real-time”. According to Conway, the biggest opportunity is in “real-time search”.  “Conway said that big companies Google, Facebook Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo will go after real-time aggressively. “You can’t ignore this space. I’m sure every one of these companies has a task force deployed,” he said.”

What it means: as I spelled out in my “future of local media” post a few months ago, we’re entering an era of new user paradigm around “real-time” activities and search. This is a tremendous opportunity for directory publishers to improve their user experience drastically and that’s why my company, Praized Media, has focused on developing real-time technologies that local media firms can deploy within existing or new Web properties. Expect the first live deployment of our real-time technologies in a few weeks (days?). Stay tuned!