Reuben Abraham points to a commentary by Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley after his third India visit: "The consumption story — the organic sustenance of sustainable growth and development — casts India in a very different light. Don’t get me wrong — the Indian consumer is hardly a powerful force on today’s global stage. As the accompanying chart shows, India’s per capita income and consumption levels are about half those of China’s. But it is growth at the margin that always drives powerful macro and market trends. And the Indian consumption story is, first and foremost, one of accelerating growth off a low base. The potential comes from the structure of the Indian economy: Private consumption currently accounts for 64% of Indian GDP — higher than shares in Europe (58%), Japan (55%), and especially China (42%). India’s transition to a 7% growth path in recent years is very much an outgrowth of the emerging consumerism of one of the world’s youngest populations. The increased vigor of private consumption provides a powerful leverage to the Indian growth dynamic that is rarely found in the externally-dependent developing world."

News.com writes:

David Heinemeier Hansson, a 26-year-old Copenhagen native, has built a "framework" to help Web developers be more productive and has released the package of tools through an open-source project.

His software, Ruby on Rails, only out for a little more than a year, has started a buzz among the legions of developers and high-level executives that track the trend-driven world of software development.

Hansson's quest to build a practical and productive Web development framework demonstrates how a single person can shake up the status quo, even in a development world where a few companies dominate.

The trick, said Hansson, is to "slaughter the holy cows," the well-understood ideas of computer science that dictate how programmers work. In many cases, software vendors design products for difficult problems, an approach that leads to excess complexity, he said.

His goal with Ruby on Rails is not to create a sophisticated development framework that the engineers at Google or Amazon.com will flock to. Instead, he has focused on creating templates and designs that tackle the unglamorous problems, such as making database modifications, that the great majority of Web developers face every day.

News.com writes:

Imagine a day when you would be in total control of creating your own TV channel lineup.

Instead of subscribing to a service from a cable, satellite or phone company that might offer you hundreds of channels you'll never watch, you would be able to select what you want and watch it on your own schedule.

That day might not be so far away. Slowly but surely, content that's broadcast over cable networks and through satellite providers is being distributed through the public Internet.
...
"Producers of content want as many forms of distribution as they can get to reach their audience," said Vito Palermo, founder of a start-up called Portola Networks, which is in the early days of developing technology for content providers to manage the distribution of their content over the Web. "They would love to cut out the middlemen, but the economics must be compelling. Technology is an enabler, but there are a lot of other dynamics around consumer behavior and the business model that need to be in place first."

Much of the infrastructure to provide broadcast quality video directly over the public Internet is now available. Companies, such as Kontiki and EdgeStream, have already developed software to secure content and ensure the quality of streaming video.

Wireless Review has a nice overview:

The M:Metrics research re-affirms some widely held beliefs about specific applications, while providing hints on where they might be going: Ringtones continue to be among the most popular content applications; gaming interest continues to boom; news and information applications are broadly appealing; enterprise e-mail usage is spreading beyond executive suites; and short message service (SMS) usage is finally taking hold in the U.S.

But, the research results also pose many questions: Has the ringtone business peaked, and will the music industry force an extreme makeover? How can the wireless industry make more money from gaming? Is there an informational killer app? When will mobile messaging service (MMS) usage explode? What will it take to create enterprise e-mail ubiquity?

Red Herring writes:

Dan Schatt, an analyst with Celent, a research and consulting firm, predicts the search giant will release the service by the end of the first quarter, if not for the holidays. Google spokesperson Sonya Boralv said there was no announcement.

By launching this service, Google would likely control even a greater share of user activity on its site. With the pay-per-click model it popularized, the company collects a fee anytime a user clicks on an ad. With Google Wallet, a consumer that clicked on an ad for a product could purchase that product without leaving the site.

However, both the user and the merchant on the other end would have to sign up for the service in order for the transaction to take place, Mr. Schatt said. The money would move from the consumer’s account to the merchant’s, with Google pocketing a fee.

The third worry I talked about that evening was being blind-sided about the future. While it is true that one cannot really predict the future, it is also important to be able to anticipate the future. What I mean is that one has to build mental maps and models about tomorrow’s world so that one can instantiate the vision one has about the future.

I read a lot. I also read widely. Over the past five years, this reading (and concomitant thinking and writing) has helped build a framework to look at developments across various technologies and their impact. Out of this has emerged my view on the future which I have converted into bets into what we are doing in Netcore and other companies I have helped co-found or invested in (more on this in tomorrow’s Tech Talk).

As I result, I think of myself as the eyes and ears for these companies. It is almost my fiduciary duty to be able to place into context new developments that take place and sense how opportunities can be created from what’s happening. The discipline of daily blogging helps in doing the reading and thinking. It takes time to build the mental models for tomorrow’s world, but I do believe that I’ve managed to do this well over the past few years. The challenge now it to keep these updated as time goes in.

That is why I invest an hour a day in reading and writing. If I let this go for a few days, then I’ll break what is a good habit built over the past few years. It is easy to break a habit but very difficult to build one. This daily time investment is perhaps what I think has been the best thing I have done over the past few years. I did not realise the value when I started. Now, I do.

It is this reading that has helped shape my vision of tomorrow’s world and which I am now seeking to build out. My worry in this is that we get blind-sided by either technologies or their derivative in the form of applications and services that we did not think about. I am not seeking to build companies which we can create and sell – rather I want each of the companies to be the harbingers and platform of the new world that is being created. Whether we think of this as Internet 2.0 or Mobile 2.0, for many in the emerging markets it will be Opportunities 1.0.

These were the worries I spoke about that evening. A few months from now, there may be a different set of worries. That’s the only constant in the life of a CEO!

Tomorrow: Emergic Ecosystem