Many of the big trends in technology today are a result of the proliferation of mobile devices around the world, venture capitalist Marc Andreesson told CNBC's "Closing Bell" on Monday.
"There's a huge amount going on right now and lot of it has to do with the fact that we have the smartphone boom," Andreesson, co-founder of Andreesson Horowitz, said. "We have smartphones in the hands of 2 billion people around the world. That'll be 5 billion people in five years."
With so many people connected to the Internet on their mobile devices, that should lead to significant opportunities to build big companies, particularly application companies, on the back of this trend, Andreesson added.
He points to things like collaborative consumption, where people can request a car on their smartphones through something like Uber.
Crowd funding is another promising area. Andreesson said lots of projects can be funded on the fly by people just clicking on their phones.
(Read More: Big Venture Firms Eye Opportunity in Google Glass)
But perhaps the biggest opportunity is in online education – particularly in the developing world. "Providing a Stanford quality education to every kid in the world with a smartphone is a huge opportunity," he said. "I think online education is going to be better than the classroom."
Andreesson also said Google Glass "has the potential to be a platform as big as the smartphone."
"The first product will come out next year," he said. "We'll see how fast it takes off." Andreesson is backing Glass Collective, which looks to fund start-ups that build apps for the product.
(Read More: Google Forbids Google Glass Owners From Selling the Device)
Andreesson also recently made an investment in 3-D printing through a company called Shapeways.
"We think there's going to be a manufacturing renaissance with entirely new kinds of products designed and printed in 3-D as opposed to manufactured by machines, the way people have been doing it for a long time," he said.
—By CNBC's Justin Menza; Follow him on Twitter @JustinMenza
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