Today, with now-established capabilities such as cloud computing and social media, that same effort costs less than $100,000. The technology risk that was once enormous (particularly software) has been reduced over the last twenty years by 150x. Most of the remaining risk concerns mere scalability issues. A case in point: the rise of standardized web services allows complex software functionality to be integrated into a startup at the press of a button. Examples include Google’s Prediction API for predictive analytics and AlchemyAPI for deep learning software for pattern recognition.
