Maria Bartiromo interviews tech investor Ben Horowitz

— -- It's beginning to feel a lot like 1999 again in the technology business.

Facebook recently filed for an initial public offering that could value the company around $100 billion. Social networking is soaring, and upstarts such as Groupon and Zynga are going public with much fanfare. The leader, Apple, has become the world's most valuable company.

I caught up with one of the leading venture capitalists to find out what's behind the vibrancy in technology and how sustainable it is this time around. Ben Horowitz, who started Horowitz Andreessen with Internet billionaire and Facebook board member Marc Andreessen, says the Internet has undergone radical transformation, and the trends are just beginning to gain long-standing traction. Our interview follows, edited for clarity and length.

Q: You've invested in technology for many years. Now we see new energy and money moving into the sector. What's behind it? Where are the opportunities?

A: We are in a super special time in technology. The number of people on the Internet means you can reach a giant market very quickly, reaching 2 billion people much faster than ever before in the history of business. The number of people on the Internet with smartphones is set to double over the next four or five years. At the same time, there have been a number of platforms that have come out, such as mobile computing, cloud computing. Thirdly, there's social networking. With those three major platforms hitting all at the same time, it's nearly unprecedented. Technology is now working to the point where you can build very interesting things in a way that was hard before. As a result, technology companies are getting into and dominating other industries at a pretty rapid rate.

Q: What have you been investing in?

A: We see opportunities in everything from construction to toys to photography that is software driven and where technology companies have a real chance to become dominant in very large industries. Take toys and the amount of intelligence that you can apply to toys to make them much more interesting and real just with software and robotics technology. Another example we're invested in, Lytro, is changing photography. With Lytro, you can retake the picture after the fact, change the focus or lighting or change the perspective and look at it in 3-D. Another we're invested in is Jawbone, which makes a health bracelet that monitors your sleep, your activity, and tells you, 'Gee, you got a good night's rest last night,' or 'You only slept for a few hours and only got two hours of deep sleep and, as a result of that, you might want to drink a little more water today' and those kind of interactive things.

Q: Talk about the stool's three legs: mobility, the cloud and social networking.

A: With communication technology in general, there's a kind of certain critical mass of people. Once you get to 15% of the world's entire population using one communication technology, that's a big deal. It's beyond the theoretical at this point. The people who think it's a fad have probably not been paying that much attention.

Q: But how do we know it's not a bubble? A lot of things were real in 1999, but they were overpriced, right?