Vineet Buch (whom I met recently) of BlueRun Ventures visited India. Here are some of his thoughts:

* Consumer Internet: Internet and PC penetration remains low in India, but growth rates are encouraging.
* Mobile Value Added Services: Value-added services (VAS), such as ringtones and ringback tones, are big sources of revenue to Indian wireless carriers.
* Component Manufacturers for ODMs/OEMs: India is (finally!) getting significant high-tech manufacturing investment from big players like Nokia, Foxconn, and AMD.
* Fabless Semiconductor Companies: Big companies like TI and Intel have nurtured a technical talent pool in India in their 15+ years of local operation.
* Clean Technology: India's growing hunger for energy, its problems with pollution and waste management, and the domestic research base in electrochemistry, photovoltaics and efficient power generation provide fertile soil for clean technology startups.
* Software: The staple of the Indian tech boom. My bet is that as the large number of relatively undifferentiated offshore development companies consolidate, among the survivors will be companies that translate market knowledge gained by working with their customers into software products or services that can form the foundation of a scalable business.

Robert Cringely writes:

Google imagines a world where only single people see match.com ads, and people who can't drive see ads from taxi companies where others see Toyota campaigns. Where fraternities see ads for strip clubs, beer, Cancun weekends and LSAT prep courses, and only seniors (and their adult children) see ads for Alzheimer's drugs. What would be the value of that increased efficiency, capitalized into present dollars? Ten billion? Fifty billion? I say the value is $100 billion -- 25 percent of the total U.S. advertising market and 15 times Google's current size.

Google is going to let the telco and cable companies burn their capital building out IP-TV, knowing that Google will still be the only game in town for the crux of the whole thing: the ability to show every viewer the specific ads that companies will pay the most to show him at that specific moment. What Google wants to do with these trailers is SERVE EVERY TV COMMERCIAL ON THE PLANET because only they will be able to do it efficiently. Only they will have the database that converts those IP addresses into sales leads, only they will have the servers and disk space close enough to the viewers to feed the ads. Only Google will have the chops to run a constant, real-time auction for the next ad every consumer is about to see, and then serve that ad at the moment the program goes to commercial.

David Berlind writes:

Web 2.0? Not that I want to get into the middle of a WWWW, but If you ask me, it's more like Computer 2.0. The computer that we've come to know and love is quickly becoming a thing of the past (thus, the "uncomputer") and quickly taking its place (and drawing developers in droves) is a new collection of APIs (this time Internet-based ones) and database interfaces being offered by outfits like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, eBay, Technorati, and Amazon (as well as smaller private enterprises, governments, and other businesses).

International Herald Tribune writes:

If NFC's backers - which include heavyweights like Sony, Motorola, Nokia, MasterCard and Visa - are successful, people will use their cellphones as electronic wallets to make purchases and to buy tickets on trains and in movie theaters and to receive additional information from billboards and other points.

The way NFC differs from other radio technologies is its limited range - the radio waves reach only a few centimeters, as opposed to similar technologies that can read from a distance of meters. This means communication can be initiated only by bringing two NFC-enabled devices close together.

Sramana Mitra writes:

For the longest time, creative professionals like writers, photographers, film-makers, and musicians have been at the mercy of editors and owners of significant and prestigious media properties like The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, The Economist, MTV, HBO, and more. And yet, a handful of magazines, studios, or TV channels cannot even begin to support and lend a voice to the enormous creative spirit that exists in this world.

Today, with the advent of such phenomena as blogs and podcasting, a new era of democratic electronic media publishing has come upon us. Democratic new media publishing is the name that I give to all the user-generated electronic content being published on the Internet today at the click of a post-and-publish tab with relatively easy-to-use software. Text, photo, and video blogs are the most popular forms of this New Media paradigm.

The nerds have suddenly set free the liberal arts types in droves. The artsies have not yet quite figured out this enormous gift and its full potential. Nonetheless, the phenomenon is well at work, and it will change the rules of the game for creative professionals world-wide. It will also change the rules for marketers and brand-builders.

8. Multimedia on the Web is coming into its own.

For a long time, the web was mostly text and images. Now, as the devices and tools to create, distribute and consume multimedia are spreading, the Multimedia Web is coming alive. Whether it is podcasts, music, videos or movies, the Internet infrastructure is now there to ensure distribution. This is the world of on-demand. All those investments in fibre many years ago are now paying off. In this world, people will consume the media of their choice at the time and place of their choosing.

Mercury News: “From the big screen in your living room to the grab-your-bifocals-small screen on your cell phone, you'll be awash in video that you can watch, whenever you want it…A growing number of more popular and classic television shows are available for Internet download through Apple's online iTunes store for the video iPod. And more Internet video services are in the works to bring movies to a growing array of portable video players, including Sony's PlayStation Portable.”

John Battelle: “Someone, and I do not know who, will make a big pile of Big Media video assets freely available on the web - and not via Google Video. This will be a major studio, or television company, which will realize that once you free content, content will come back to you in mashed up and remixed glory that has - holy smokes! - real business models like advertising and retail attached. The deal will be simple: anyone can download, rip, and mix this video, but if you plan to make money from it - even selling ads next to it - you have to cut a deal with the mother ship. The company that does this will be heralded as either visionary, lunatic, or both.”

David Kirkpatrick in Fortune: “Every single trend that matters involves more bits flowing through more Internet-protocol pipes. As video online—the most data-intensive web application of all—becomes more pervasive, bit traffic will grow. Cisco remains so dominant in the business of building Internet-protocol infrastructure that its earnings growth could wow investors in 2006.”

Corante: “Video on the web will finally be realized. Powered by the continued penetration of broadband (wired and wireless alike), video on the web will become ‘very popular’, according to Robin Good. He notes, ‘2006 should see the launch of Brightcove and of some other major new brands in this space.’ Mark Hamilton also observes that we've seen ‘[v]ideo everywhere. We've seen it on iPods, on web sites, on newspaper web sites, on blogs, delivered by RSS…The big networks are on board.’”

Tomorrow: Free Voice