When faced with the reality that their industry is increasingly dominated by a handful of giants, the general insouciance of Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists is hard to fathom. How can they be so sanguine about the prospects for the next generation of start-ups when today’s industry leaders seem intent on colonising all parts of the tech landscape?

One answer often heard from the start-up investors is that a new form of computing is already emerging beyond the reach of the dominant cloud platforms. Companies riding this new trend are springing up like weeds through the cracks in a sidewalk, filling in new parts of the computing landscape that are not easy for the behemoths to address.

Like all tech trends, it has its own buzzword: the rise of the “edge”. It reflects the falling costs and increasing capabilities that are pushing intelligence into more and more devices. That, in turn, is making it easier to collect and process more data locally, far from the centralised cloud data centres. This is not happening in opposition to the cloud, but in parallel with it: devices working on the edge still operate in concert with centralised data centres, which co-ordinate and handle the most intensive data storage and processing needs.