Business World has an article by Sanjay Anandaram of JumpStartUp, a VC firm. Entitled "The Choking of Innovation", Sanjay says: "India's much-vaunted IT industry has to change dramatically to maintain its leadership. A fundamental re-think of the business has to occur."

For one, the next 10 years for the industry will not be anything like the first 10 years. Increased globalisation, increased choices for employees and customers, and increased competition will force big changes. The industry has grown admirably over the past decade and a half and has attracted the attention of the world. That means Indian IT services now have to contend with brutal global competition and market demands.

Indian IT services companies are prisoners of their own success. Enjoying unprecedented market capitalisations thanks to terrific earnings growth, they find it hard to make investments with unsure time horizons and pay-offs. Investments will dent their earnings and affect stock prices. Investments to explore new business models, partnerships, undertake M&A transactions of any significance, hire globally, do research, and create organisational change are sure to impact near-term earnings. But what of the serious possibility of an adverse impact on business in a few years if these investments are not made now?

Instead of investing their cash surpluses in long-term investments, Indian companies tend to reward their shareholders with hefty, tax-free dividend payouts (thereby enjoying shareholder loyalty) and perform treasury management functions by investing the money in safe mutual funds. Clearly, these companies are signalling that they have no other productive or imaginative use for this capital (e.g. investing in long-term competence and capability development) than paying dividends. The management's conservativeness is reinforced by the pressure of maintaining quarterly earnings.

It is disheartening from an industry standpoint to see hundreds of millions of dollars simply lying on the balance sheet and not being invested in creating innovative competitive advantages for the future. It is disheartening to see companies lack the confidence to take big, bold steps, even after 20 successful years in the global arena. The ability to dream big on a global level and then take the required steps to realise the dreams is what will distinguish the true global players from the also-rans in the next 10 years.

Mindsets need to change dramatically, especially among leadership levels. From managing status quos to managing risks, from managing people to managing businesses and leveraging opportunities, from managing Indians to managing a diverse global workforce, from a 'span of control' to a 'span of competencies' - all these initiatives are essential for success. Career paths for R&D and industry experts, for example, need to be made as attractive as jobs that are oriented to people management. An entrepreneurial environment and mindset has to be put in place.

Amy Wohl has started a blog on IBM's Developer site. From the introduction: "Amy Wohl discovered the on-line software opportunity early and has followed it through its many phases, most recently the ASP wave (a part of the Internet bubble). All along, she has been certain that SaaS could work and that it was just a matter of combining the right software, the right infrastructure, the right business model, and the right customers. Of course, that isn’t easy. This time, she thinks, we’re ready to go up the ramp and make the market and she wants to share the journey with you, talking about what it takes to succeed and how we’re doing along the way.. Wohl is an information industry analyst who has been observing, consulting to, and writing about users and software companies for more than 30 years."

Silicon Valley Watcher writes about Microsoft's next generation Xbox game console, code-named Xenon and what it means:

Xenon will be the first in a series of PC-like devices that are tied directly to games, music, movies and simple applications through mostly web-based services.

This is the trend. The PC-centric model is disappearing as digital devices designed for specific purposes — such as digital cameras, cell phones, portable digital audio players, and portable digital video players — don't rely on PCs as a content/communications gateway.

Instead, the developing model is to use tightly bundled hardware, software and services to provide secure digital rights management (DRM) and protected access to aggregated content. This protects against unlawful hacks and limits damage to the platform.

Microsoft said that Xenon would be more of a digital entertainment hub than the current Xbox. This would give it a ready platform for its DRM technology and for its MSN online network.

The loser in such a future is Intel, since the platform hardware is less important than the services it channels.

Wired writes: "Now come the first stirrings of what may be the most telling sign of this shift from hardcore to hybrid: people who are both middle of the road and off the grid. Across the US some 185,000 households have switched from the local power company to their own homegrown, renewable energy. The fastest-growing segment of this population - their ranks are doubling each year - isn't doing a full Kaczynski. Sure, these folks are slapping solar panels on the roof and erecting the occasional wind turbine, but they're staying connected to the grid, just to be safe. And in many cases, they're operating as mini-utilities, selling excess electricity back to the power company. Just as their cars aren't kludgy and their food isn't flavorless, their homes aren't drafty or dimly lit. Call them hygridders. And look for them soon in a neighborhood near you. Because - trendmeisters, take note - hygrid is the new Prius."

SiliconBeat writes:

When BJ Fogg was head of U.S. research at Casio in the late 1990s, he wanted to use a technology commonly used for speed reading to deliver content to watches and other devices.

Casio never embraced the idea. But Fogg is getting a second chance. Now director of research and design at Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab, Fogg is leading a research team that is testing the same technology - known as RSVP - to easily present large amounts of text on tiny mobile phone screens.

This is not pie-in-the-sky stuff. His researchers have an entrepreneurial hunger, Fogg says. The lab's created a public service called BuddyBuzz that anyone with the right mobile phone can use. And the team is studying the commercial feasibility of the technology.

"We think there's definitely commercial potential for delivering text content to mobile phones and we're exploring some of those options,'' he said. "There are members of the team who would love to spin this out to a company.''

But first, more about the technology.

Even with newer mobile de�vices with larger screens, the amount of text that can be displayed at any one time is limited, forcing people to scroll or tab from paragraph to paragraph or page to page.

BuddyBuzz's technology largely avoids those issues. RSVP - for rapid serial visual presentation - quickly flashes words on a screen one at a time. The streaming process lets you stare at the screen and just absorb the text, without having to shift your eyes back and forth. The technology also allows the typeface size of text to be larger because just word at a time is on the screen.

Russell Beattie writes:

The idea can be summed up in a phrase: "What's Notes is New Again." Right now blog tools allow you to create a "post" which is usually comprised of just a few fields: title, content, date, and maybe categories or tags. I've seen some other fields like media links as Enclosures (essential for podcasting), geotags for location, and there's been a sputtering effort to add in the iCal namespace for calendaring, but all these seem to be in separate worlds. In other words, you'd have a feed that's generally one thing or another, and not really combined into one thing. What I'm thinking about is a way of looking at "posts" or in RSS nomenclature: "items" as containers for arbitrary data in labeled fields, in a way that can be easily extended and re-used. Sort of like a "note" in Lotus Notes.

Imagine in your aggregator you could receive not only "Posts" but forms as well. And calendaring info, and images, etc. And this stuff wasn't just HTML formatted inside the Description tag, but actually processable by the aggregator itself. I guess then the Aggregator becomes a Universal Data Reading Client instead. On the other side of the equasion, I currently have a weblog which has only one way to create new items, a button called "New Post" which has just two fields, Title and Content. Now what would happen if I added more ways to create items: "New Calendar Item" and "New Review" and "New Classified", etc. Each one of these extra types of posts would all have Title and Content, but they'd also have fields filled with additional arbitrary information which was included in the RSS also. If your aggregator didn't understand these fields, they could just display them.

So how do the aggregators "know" how to process the fields? Well, they don't automagically - the developer of the aggregator will decide to support some sorts of fields and just display the others. I can imagine some systems building a plug-in architecture which could read the various Fieldsets, but in general we'd all probably just do our best. Sort of how aggregators work right now.

Dear Abhishek,

As you look ahead, you will find that we are at a time of very rapid innovation. Perhaps, it has always been that way – and every generation feels the same! But I definitely don’t think that the pace was so rapid when I was growing up. We got news once or twice a day via the newspapers or the single (government-owned) TV and radio channel that we had. It took a lot of time to get a phone line. And when we did talk outside of the local area, it was incredibly expensive. Most long-distance communication ended up being by hand-written letters. When we took photos, we got them printed and put in an album. When we needed to look up information or do research, we went to the library. My first experience of a computer was when I was 15 years old – shortly after the personal version was launched.

Contrast this with the world today. News flows continuously on the Internet and dozens of TV channels. Alerts are delivered on mobiles. Phones are available on-demand, and talk is cheap as it is getting digitized and sent over the Internet. Most communication today is via email, IM or SMS. I don’t even remember writing a letter in my own handwriting for a long time! Photos are taken with digital cameras or the mobile phones and can be immediately available via online photo albums. A lot of the world’s information is now just a few clicks away and accessible via search engines. The computer will be part of your life from very early on – as you will probably watch videos and listen to music on it. And this is all happening today!

Now, extrapolate to the future. You can already start thinking how life will be different. Every generation brings with it learnings from the past. Managing multiple media, relationships and transactions simultaneously will probably come completely naturally to you. Even so, I can barely imagine how life will be when you will be 20 in the year 2025. While some things – like the length of the day – will continue to always be the same, what you do in the day and how you do those things will probably be quite different. All said and done, you are a product of a different era. I hope your mother and I can recognise that.

What you – and every human – has is the ability to learn. I hope you will make good use of that ability. There is an incredible foundation that now exists for you to build upon. We have the world’s information accessible for you to study – perhaps, there is too much of it. What’s more, you have the daily production of content by millions of people in the form of blogs on virtually every topic in the world. You have devices and networks capable of providing you access to all of that – instantaneously.

It is a fascinating world you’ve been born in. It is infinitely more complex than the world I was born in and grew up in. I am sure you will be able to cut through this maze of activity and create your own space. As you grow up, you will use your senses to build your own mental models of the world around you. To help you understand what’s happening, I thought I’d start by putting together some of the big ideas that we are seeing around us today. As you read these essays (and I hope to write one every few years), you will get a sense of where we are coming from and how an older generation views the future.

Tomorrow: My World