CNNMoney has an article about Kurzweil and the Singularity Summit of a few weeks ago. In the short article, Chris Taylor talks a little about the financial impact of the exponential growth of information technology:

Think of the long half-century it took IBM (Research) to rise to dominate the computing world. Now compare that to the decade between Microsoft's (Research) IPO and the establishment of its monopoly on operating systems. And then contrast that to Google's (Research) lightning-quick ascendance to power.