While spending some time here in the Santa Clara Convention Center after Cloud Expo, I just can’t but get the feeling the tech world is onto the next big thing. The Cloud Expo was full of activity, a ton of new startups, funding, deployments, revenue growth and all the other positives you would expect from a fast-growing market.

We even had a mini bubble burst that hasn’t been discussed much and that is many of the cloud storage vendors have been wiped out – as a result of the fact that competing with Amazon head-to-head is not an easy task. Perhaps that is why there are a bunch of new cloud security startups who are tacking very complex tasks – something that is not commoditized and an area where significant value can be added and charged for.

But what put the icing on the cake as I sit here is a person who handed me a business card for his company RMS. This risk management company is hiring. In fact they have a food truck which they are sponsoring across the street from the convention center. When I asked the person who handed out the card if he was in marketing, he said, “No, recruitment.”

When I ran a show called Communications Solutions in the Valley in 1999 or so I recall Cisco buying a coffee cart from my sales team. I queried the details, not quite understanding why they wanted to be outside the exhibit all. Turns out it was their recruitment division spending the sponsorship dollars.

To me the events of the week puts more light on the skilled versus unskilled workforce challenge the world faces. Tech and other companies are scrambling for professionals who are knowledgeable in math, science and engineering and the streets are full of protesters – some of whom decided to pursue majors which aren’t in such high demand.

Getting back to the Valley – it feels like a new wave of energy and excitement here in Northern California. Hopefully it will continue and many of the companies in this area will start to be hiring engines like tech companies in this state have been in years past.

I use Web 3.0 as just a generic term for the next phase of tech growth – it may be more correct to refer to it as the new “cloud & mobile economy”.