The McKinsey Quarterly writes: "India's growing market for consumer goods, already in the top ten, could reach $400 billion by 2010—making it one of the five largest in the world. Add the fact that during the next few decades India will likely surpass China as the world's most populous country, and it is clear that multinational consumer goods companies seeking faster growth must begin to focus on the subcontinent...The modernization of India's retailing sector will complicate life for consumer goods companies, which must not only go on building and leveraging their far-flung small-store networks but also adopt key-account-management skills from the developed world and other countries where modern retailing has moved ahead. To complicate matters further, local retailers are aggressively launching store brands, and Indian consumers don't differentiate between them and brand-name products from big consumer goods companies, according to our research. Clearly, the growth of modern retailing will be a boon for Indian customers. But to maximize the Indian opportunity, big consumer goods companies must learn to manage a widespread distribution network as well as to navigate the modern retailing sector."

Tom Coates writes:

The concept is really simple - there are concepts in the world that can be loosely described as being made up of aggregations of other smaller component concepts. In such systems, if you encourage the tagging of the smallest component parts, then you can aggregate those tags up through the whole system. You get - essentially - free metadata on a whole range of other concepts.
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The upshot of all of this is that you start getting a way of navigating between a whole range of different concepts based on these combinations of tags and ratings. The tags give you subject related metadata, the ratings give you qualitative metadata and from this you can start finding new ways to say, "If you liked this song, you may also like this album, network, album or artist". You can start to generate journeys that move you from network to that networks most popular songs, through to the best albums on related themes (or which conjure similar moods or associations even if they're by radically different artists) and so on.

Ryan McIntyre has an interesting viewpoint:

To me, the most profound aspect of Google's pay-per-click model is the fact that it is powered by an auction marketplace that resembles eBay's, only it is far more efficient and is sublimely frictionless, with Google collecting a much larger share of each transaction since they are not only the marketplace, but also the supplier and seller of the inventory. Even more impressive is that Google runs a real-time auction (which is really a hairy multivariate optimization problem that would impress even the brightest Wall Street quant) to serve advertising links every time someone searches on Google or views an AdSense-enabled page.

To put this in perspective, the NYSE and NASDAQ see average daily trading volumes in the low billions, while Google is certainly processing and delivering a comparable order of magnitude of advertising auction transactions every day given the number of searches performed daily coupled with the much greater number of page views generated by AdSense publishers.

This is Mobility writes: "Systems somewhat like Semapedia.org, and by extension Semacode, have been around for a while. If we take the base idea as attaching some bit of information to a place, there are projects using Bluetooth to find nearby devices (which can include static beacons) and using GPS and triangulation based on Wifi access points or cell phone towers. What really stuck out about this one for me was that the information was embedded right in the tag. For most location based services you have some central server in the sky that takes the information about your location and directs you to the right resource. It centralizes control and restricts what people can do with the system. However, the semacode embeds the information for the resource right in the tag. No central control, no intermediating server, no need to get my information “put into the system” for others to look up. I just put my info online and I can print out the tags myself. Completely federated tagging. That was one of the big plusses that caught my attention when I first read about it. There’s no infrastructure that needs to be ongoing in order to support it. People need to have a reader installed on their phone, but that can’t be “broken” by a central server being down or taken out of service. Once you bootstrap this effort it stays up."

Om Malik writes about the commodisation of voice and its long-term impact:

The evolution of newer “thin clients” that fit into the emerging economy lifestyles will also start to use voice for free. As a word of caution, it is not going to be today, or tomorrow or even two years from now. This is a long drawn out process, that should take somewhere between five to ten years. But like a big lumbering boxer, who has taken many a few punches, its going to slowly slide before hitting the deck. There are a handful of reasons for that. If you took into account the current user patterns, no one except Skype is getting meaningful “voice” traffic. (That’s because Skype is viewed as a free voice service with IM features, and not the other way around.) However, as many of the younger users start to get comfortable with Voice over IM, the voice traffic over IM networks is going to increase. Microsoft’s XBox Live, where trash-talking over the network using headsets while playing Halo (and/or other games) has gone through a similar slow-but-steady growth curve. I think we are going to see similar adoption and usage patterns for the Voice-over-IM services.

The two key drivers of the next Internet, as I outlined in my Business Today article, will be next-generation networks and mobile phones. The majority of the next users will come from the world’s emerging markets. In addition, server-based computing will be the norm as applications and services shift away from the desktop to the web. The next web will go beyond text and be built around rich media. User-generated content will be another important element of this web. Subscriptions will be an important element of the next Internet – both for content and computing. So, if you project the current trends, what would one do with infinite bandwidth, zero cost for processing power, and infinite storage? What is the single most important commodity in this world? It is the user's attention. Money will be made by monetising that attention.

Let us discuss each of these points in greater detail.

Next-Generation Networks will be broadband and ubiquitously available. They will be IP-based and provide a digital infrastructure for all kinds of services – voice, data and video. They will be available in our homes and offices, and also accessible from our mobile phones and other handheld devices. They will create the foundation for a converged world where we can get the applications and services we want where we want them and on the device of our choice. The endpoints of these high-speed pipes will be screens of varying sizes and multiple input options (small keypads like on a phone, full-size keyboards which are part of a computer, and also voice).

Mobile Phones will be the devices we will carry with us everywhere. Already, nearly two billion people in the world have mobile phones. With next-generation networks (3G, WiFi, WiMax) being rolled out, the devices will also become much more sophisticated than the ones we see today. Consider this news item from Wireless Watch Japan: “NTT DoCoMo and Sony Ericsson have introduced a new concept model called the RADIDEN, claiming the world's first cell phone that has been equipped with a three-band AM/FM/TV tuner. The handset incorporates a dual-front design: one side can be used as a cell phone, and on the other side is a radio designed for the 2G MOVA network. The radio features easy-to-select channels, a dedicated single-color sub-display (16.7x23.1mm), as well as visible buttons allowing the user to use i-mode while listening to the radio.”

Complementing mobiles phones will be network computers. These devices will have limited local processing power and storage. Instead they will rely on the high-speed pipes of the next-generation networks to connect them to computing grids. This will make computing not just affordable but also more manageable.

Interestingly, these technologies will find greater use and acceptance in the world’s emerging markets. These countries have, for the most part, seen only a small penetration of communications and computing technologies. Driven by mobiles phones and network computers, the world’s billions in the emerging markets will finally be connected and integrated into the global village. Their limited legacy infrastructure and the desire for rapid development will see them as early adopters of the New Internet.

Tomorrow: Defining Themes (continued)