India Knowledge@Wharton reports on a panel I participated in recently. One of my comments:

Jain: One of the first things you need to innovate is the ability to imagine tomorrow's world. How is the future going to be different? The entrepreneur in some ways has to live in that future world. We don't do enough of that in India. We tend to project based on what we're seeing today. But just looking at the impact of developments today helps you imagine the future. For example, what happens if broadband comes, what happens if the mobile data infrastructure becomes even better than it is right now with 3G networks? Then what are the new opportunities which become available?

Second, what's required is the ability to think big. We have a large domestic market in India. What are its needs and how can one go about fulfilling these needs, rather than just looking outside India? So it's about products and solutions for the local market.

The third thing is the ability to be prepared to fail. What would you do if you were not afraid of failure? This is very important because otherwise we tend to think very incrementally. Of course, an entrepreneur is not necessarily a person who goes out there trying just to make audacious decisions. As an entrepreneur, you're basically going out there every day to reduce your risk of failure. But, at the same time, you need to look at disruptive innovations rather than just think incrementally. If you put all of this together, you'll see the world very differently and new ideas will emerge.

Jason Calacanis writes:

The real story of Web 2.0 has little to do with the bells and whistles and everything to do with the stunning growth of online advertising. If you look there is a valley between the dotcom spending days (99/2000) and today, but the trend line would be fairly straight if you held a ruler over the 97 to 2006 points--which I do here with the black line.

That dotcom overspend, and the dip after it, shouldn't have happened. Those swings were due to the emotional roller coaster of the dotcom bubble on the way up, and four huge events after: the dotcom bubble bursting, the accounting scandals, 9/11, and the brief recession caused by those first three.

Is the spike over the past year another bubble? I don't think so.

Bambi Francisco writes:

As the online video world explodes with everything from amateur snippets to full-length features, new search engines are crawling, tagging and organizing the visual data.

The goal: To find the most relevant video, and not just any video.

Clearly, we're at a point when watching video online has become an intriguing, amusing and entertaining experience. Seven years ago, when I started doing videos that were streamed on the Web, it was painful for me to watch the 15 frames per second and the endless buffering. Today, it's less painful and certainly bearable.

By 2007, consumers won't just want bearable video, however. They'll want organized video. Heretofore, it's been about making video available and easy to watch. Tomorrow, it'll be about making it easy for people to find what they want amid the explosion of video content going online.

Venture Beat has an article by Ken Elefant outlining 7 ways to do mobile ads:

1) Marketing via SMS/MMS
2) WAP banner ads
3) Location-based advertising
4) Video ads on cell phones
5) In-game advertising:
6) Online coupons
7) Interstitial ads

Tim O'Reilly quotes Craig Kaplan of predictwallstreet.com:

I feel there is a big difference between user generated content and collective intelligence.

For example, PredictWallStreet.com focuses one million unique monthly visitors on predicting whether a stock will close up or down. With the help of our algorithms the community can outperform the market -- something most analysts can't do. That's not user-generated content, that's a cognitive community exhibiting super intelligent behavior.

Wikipedia exhibits super intelligent behavior when it is more comprehensive and more up to date than encyclopedia Britannica. Britannica has the brand, but Wikipedia has the Brains on Board. And with very minimal software, Wikipedia directs millions of minds to create a new and better kind of encyclopedia. That's not just user-generated content. It's a cognitive community exhibiting super intelligent behavior.

Together we form a super intelligence that is a lot smarter than any one of us alone. As you say, Web 2.0 truly is just the froth before the wave. I believe networks of super intelligent cognitive communities are our future.

2006 has been the year of video and social networking. YouTube in video, and the likes of MySpace, Facebook and Mixi in social networking, have defined these two spaces. Both are secular trends – in the sense that they are not going to go away. Video is a natural evolution from the limited world of text and images that we have seen in the first decade of the Internet. Social networking is an extension of how we all live – for and around family and friends. In the world of social networking, one of the early pioneers was Cyworld, which started in South Korea. In this week's Tech Talk, we will take a closer look at Cyworld, and see what ideas, if any, are relevant in the Indian context.

Wikipedia provides an over view of Cyworld:

Cyworld is a South Korean web community site operated by SK Communications, a subsidiary of SK Telecom. Literally translated, "Cyworld" can mean "cyber world", but it's also a play on the Korean word for relationship, so it could also mean "relationship world." It takes the concept of personal, virtual rooms similar to MySpace, CokeMusic, and AeroWorld which is still in service in the USA to promote their products.

Members cultivate on- and off-line relationships by forming Ilchon buddy relationships with each other through a service called "minihompy", which encompasses a photo gallery, message board, guestbook, and personal bulletin board. A user can link his/her minihompy to another user's minihompy to form a buddy relationship. It is similar to U.S. based Facebook and MySpace websites. It has been reported that as much as 90 percent of South Koreans in their 20s[1] and 25 percent of the total population of South Korea[2] are registered users of Cyworld, and as of September 2005, daily unique visitors are about 20 million.

Your Life. Your World. Cyworld.
Cyworld is a whole new way to connect with the people in your world. Here you'll find friends you know, new people to meet, clubs to join and special spaces for your photos, artwork, journals and more. In Cyworld, you can meet up, hang out, play, dream and share your world like never before.

Build your Minihome - Your personal space in Cyworld.
Write your profile. Keep up with your friends. Upload your photos, drawings and images - we give you unlimited storage so you can save and display as many as you want.

Design your Miniroom
A place to tell stories and bring your dreams to life. Travel to exotic lands, talk about last weekend's party or cozy up with a cutie - the only limit is your imagination.

Create your Minime - your avatar in Cyworld.
Your Minime represents all aspects of you ... the "you" inside of you, the "you" you want to be. Or just the "you" you feel like sharing today. Have fun styling your Minime. You can change its hair, clothing, facial expression, mood, position and background as often as you like.

Connect with friends
Go out and visit friends, exchange gifts, post messages, create neighborhoods, join a club or even start a club. Millions of people around the globe have already moved into Cyworld. We'll think you'll like it here, too.