Forbes writes:

Always on and always with you, the cell phone is the most personal and ubiquitous gadget ever devised; 1.5 billion are in use worldwide, and last year 690 million were sold, six times the number of PCs and laptops. Suddenly this high-tech talisman is morphing into something even bigger--a futuristic entertainment system and the most exciting new tech platform since the Internet. Wireless carriers send ever larger chunks of data ever faster across the airwaves. Makers pump out phones with bigger screens, 3-D graphics chips and lush digital sound and video. Newly inspired entrepreneurs and entertainment titans alike are in a mad rush to develop songs, graphics, games and videos to light up millions of teensy screens.

"The mobile phone is the most exciting software platform in history.It's connected to the Internet, it's truly global, and it's an essential part of everyone's lifestyle," says Mitchell Lasky, founder of Jamdat in Los Angeles.

Barron's writes in its cover story: "eBay has become the world's most important e-commerce company. It's also a company the stock market has become extraordinarily worried about -- and therein lies an investment opportunity."

Adam Bosworth writes about some of the problems:

First, printing is still hard. The browser has never grown up to enable the page author to easily describe an alternate layout for printing which is a shame. Why isn't there an "HTML" for printing which can describe rotation, freeze column or row headers, and so on?

Secondly, the browser isn't a good listener to external events. If you want to build an application, for example, to show you instantly when someone bids or a price changes, it is hard. You can poll, but poll too frequently and the application starts to feel sluggish and it isn't easy to do this. What you really want is an event driven model where in addition to the events like typing the page can describe events like an XMPP message or a VOIP request or a data-changed post for an ATOM feed.

Third, if you want the application to run offline, you are essentially out of luck. I've written about this at length before in this blog and don't need to repeat what is required in detail. To summarize what I said earlier, a local cache, a smart template model, and a synchronization protocol are required to build applications that run equally well connected and disconnected and the way that the Blackberry works is a role model for all of us here.

What I predict will drive this change is the advent of truly mobile computing on mobile devices. This is going to force the game to change. It is way too expensive to build solutions for mobile on J2ME and often too poor a customer experience when they are built using WAP (except for super simple things). I think that we're going to rethink browsing around a model which has pub/sub, events, and caching built in and which doesn't have the problems with re-layout.

O'Reilly Radar writes:

An article [recently] in the New York Times, Big Papers Find National Ads a Tough Sell, opens with the assertion that advertisers, inspired by the success of targeted advertising via services like Google's AdSense, are starting to turn away from large national papers, and spending more on local or regional papers.

This started a train of thought for me. Why is this trend just "inspired by"? Why isn't it "powered by?" Between Google News, Google Maps, and Google Local, Google might just have the right information to help advertisers place targeted ads in local newspapers. Where is there more interest in particular topics or products? What kinds of searches are most associated with particular ad click-throughs? What if newspapers, and not just web sites, could sign up for Google AdSense, mirroring Google's collective intelligence into offline media? I'm sure the targeting wouldn't be nearly as good, because it would be leveraging yesterday's clickstream for insight rather than a current page view, but it could be a lot better than the "pin the tail on the donkey" game that print advertisers play today.

The whole idea of online/offline integration is very much on my mind, especially in the context of location (again, see Where 2.0). The aforementioned NYT article points out that one reason local papers are getting more of the advertising pie is their willingness to do ad inserts targeted by zip code. But why will advertisers stop there? As more and more devices are location-enabled, and as companies such as Google and Yahoo! know more and more about what people are looking for in particular locations and at particular times, there's going to be more and more context for targeted advertising "offline", because there really won't be an "offline" anymore. To use David Weinberger's felicitous phrase, we're entering the age of the "Semantic Earth."

morph has an overview of The Media Center's Mobile Media: Opportunities and Strategies for a Mobile, Broadband Generation program. A little backgrounder about the growing influence of mobiles in our lives:

Here's a call to artists and writers (hereafter known as content providers): Prepare to create for a whole new market, those with spare money to invest. Prepare to pay attention. And for those with spare time, prepare to never stop paying.

In the future, you're going to have a lot more options concerning how to spend your downtime, roughly defined as the time in-between the times you're actually doing something. If you're home and you're bored, you turn on the TV. If you're bored in the car, there's the radio. But what if you're bored in an elevator or in a line? What if the waiter is taking forever with your salad or you arrived at the theater early? You could try meditating, but Buddhism doesn't fit in the Mobilista plans to fill every second of your day with something to do. You take out your cell phone and while away the seconds.

The first mobile phones (Generation 1) were analog, the next (G2) were digital, and we're now entering the G3 era, where phones have a cornucopia of new uses, including 4 to 6 gigabyte hard drives, text messaging (140 characters per screen) and the full streaming of channels that will deliver video and MP3 quality sound. Before you write this off as a passing fad,consider that American Idol gets 14 million text messages during voting. It's a world with 150 different devices on the market, where "viral" is a good thing, where immediacy trumps quality, and there are so many protocols it makes the VHS/Beta debate look like rock/paper/scissors.

The Mobilistas figure, with good reason, that nowadays no one leaves home without their keys, their wallet, and their cell phone. If they could take over your keys and your wallet, they probably would, but right now they're aiming at what they can get at. Mobile media, media in bite-sized chunks - where the biggest sellers are ringtones and wallpaper, making overnight millionaires of people smart enough to be selling them - is specifically created to access on the move. It's not TV -- too long. It's not Internet -- the screen's too small for serious research and it's not even compatible with HTML. Mobile media is a brand new thing, aimed at people who can't stand going for one single nanosecond without something to do.

A few weeks ago, Radhika Dhawan from Business World came and interviewed me for a story they were doing on five years of the dotcom bust. The article was published this week. There are five first-person accounts (based on the interviews). Here is the introduction:

The dotcom euphoria burst exactly five years ago in India. During the giddy days of the Net boom, hope, excitement, greed and world-changing ideas jostled with each other, and changed the lives of the participants of the Net economy forever. It was a time "when the world went a little bit mad". BW's Radhika Dhawan asked five people, who were in the thick of things then, what they think of it all in hindsight.

Let us start with my first-person account as written by Radhika. The text with my photo in the article introduces me thus: “He is the original poster boy of the dotcom era, who struck it big by selling his portal to Sify for Rs 499 crore. As always, we found Rajesh Jain still believing that every idea must aim to change the world. Else, what’s the point?”

With luck on his side
Rajesh Jain
CEO, Netcore Solutions

There is a book, Lucky or Smart?, by a man called Bo Peabody, who ran a company called Tripod. My answer is you have to be smart to be in a situation where you get lucky. A friend once gave me a piece of advice: More than knowing when to enter a business, it is also important to know when to exit a business. You can't begin a business with the objective of selling it one day. But if an offer comes along, you need to be smart about it.

I launched Indiaworld a week after Yahoo! was formally launched on 13 March 1995. With any new technology, we tend to overestimate what it can do in the short term and underestimate what it can do in the long term. But for anything to work, the ecosystem has to fall into place. Thomas Friedman in The World Is Flat talks about the telecom boom and how some of the same mistakes were made there.

The second point I want to make is about entrepreneurs. You have to distinguish between those who go in there motivated only by money and those who go in to change the world. An entrepreneur has to have a little bit of the 'change the world' thing in him. If I have to get my passion across, I have to believe that what I am doing is the next big thing. If I don't believe in it how will I convince others? So you have to paint that picture of tomorrow.

Looking back, I think the most positive aspect of the dotcom boom is that it gave people a flavour of entrepreneurship. People quit well-paying jobs to see what the other side is all about. I wish it had lasted a little longer. Then we would have had a lot of money invested in the Internet business in India. That's what has happened in China. At least four portals managed to raise $100 million-plus on the IPO offerings. So when the dotcom boom went bust, they had the cash to discover mobile and gaming businesses. Businesses and markets may vanish but these companies had the cash to morph into something different. From these situations emerge the next big ideas. That culture of entrepreneurship would have lasted if we had a lot more ideas.

My focus has really been on how to use technology as a platform and as a tool for change. How can we create solutions for the next billion people in emerging markets? We need disruptive innovations in such markets.

For instance, how do you deliver education differently? You need to leapfrog in the delivery of services. How can we build technology-enabled solutions which can be used in India first? How can you envision tomorrow's world and go out and create it? Indiaworld was a vindication of that belief.