Tech barons paint rosy future at Davos despite security fears

Technological advances are to explode 10 times faster than even the Internet boom in the 1990s, top tech tycoons told the global Davos elite, but also warned that security threats would be worse this year than ever.

As the world's political and business movers-and-shakers opened their annual meeting in the Swiss ski resort of Davos, one of the hot-button issues was the impact of technology on society and the growing income gap.

John Chambers, chief executive of tech giant Cisco, wowed the assembled elites with a bold prediction: "Take what happened with the Internet in the 1990s, multiply it by 10 and that's what you're about to see and the benefits are going to be seen by every single person."

"Every company, every country, every person is going to become digital," said Chambers, head of one of the world's biggest tech companies. "This will change society for the better."

Meanwhile, PayPal founder Max Levchin told Davos that revolutions in data management and wearable tech were going to transform societies both in the developed world and in emerging nations.