Ajit Jaokar quotes Robert Scoble from a Mercury News interview:

Q How do you sort the hype from reality in this current wave of Internet companies?

A I look for doubling effects. I look for things that continue to see doubling in size. The instant messenger ICQ launched in 1996. By the time I signed up, six weeks later, they had 65,000 downloads. Back then the word-of-mouth network wasn't so efficient.

My scepticism right now is about how many Web 2.0 Web sites have audiences. The one site people outside the geek world talk to me about is Zillow (which gives real estate price estimates). It's easy to get doubling effects inside a passion chamber -- all the people who care about something will check it out. It's hard to have it double forever. The trick is to know if it has a chance to jump from the passionate few to the unpassionate many.

Techcrunch writes:

Here’s what’s cool about Wizag. The service’s semantic analysis pulls topics out of each post in the feeds you are subscribed to and lets you click to read all posts in your feeds related to the same topic. Most feed readers have a search function, but Wizag finds likely topics and lists the number of other items in subscriptions that discuss the same topic. It’s a smart automation of possible searches before they are even performed.

You can tag, comment and vote on any item in your feeds. It’s a shame that this metadata stays inside Wizag, but item ranking, or determining the order that items appear in your reader, is done through an algorithm that incorporates the click-throughs, votes, comments and subscriptions you and other users have gestured with.

Alan Schulman writes:

The challenge for us as interactive creatives is to start looking beyond enhanced banners and pre-rolls and start developing new ad experiences, dashboards, widgets and advergames that can live adjacent to these environments and become more encouraging to viewers. As much as the ad models for these new experiences are challenging traditional media planning and buying services, so too do we as a creative community need to move quickly to keep up with the velocity of change that's presenting us with new environments and experiences within which to serve every week.

Building cool contextual messages that live within or adjacent to personalized content or search results isn't rocket science. We just have to get past the traditional penchant for serving the same stuff we have been for years. Evolving our creative from banners to rich media to broadband video has still been a challenge for the interactive industry to standardize-- and we haven't got that right yet.

BBC News writes:

Where do the techno tots like to go online?

Not surprisingly, the most popular sites are based on children's TV shows.

Many offer the opportunity to play games with different levels of difficulty, watch video clips, interact with a story or print out your favourite character.

BBC Cbeebies online producer Olivia Dickinson says: "They use fine motor skills when they use the mouse or keyboard. So they can go up to using the spacebar, to using the arrow keys, to using the mouse.

"They also learn some gross motor skills, in terms of some of the bigger movements of the mouse, but also in terms of physical development, when we give them activities to do in front of the computer, like dance and music.

The International Herald Tribune writes:

European mobile phone companies spent $129 billion six years ago to buy licenses for "third-generation" networks that were supposed to give people the freedom to virtually live from their cellphones, reading e-mail, browsing the Internet, placing video calls, enjoying music and movies, buying products and services, making reservations, monitoring health - all from the beach, the bus, the dentist's waiting room, wherever they were.

But today, most people use their cellphones just as they did in 2000 - to make calls - and the modest gains 3G has made do not begin to justify the massive costs of the technology, which has strapped some mobile operators financially, bankrupted entrepreneurs, spurred multibillion-euro lawsuits against governments and phone companies, and sapped research spending.

Over the long term, 3G runs the risk of becoming the Edsel of the mobile phone industry - an expensive, unwanted albatross rejected by consumers and bypassed by other, less costly technologies, some experts say.

I wrote about the mobile Internet as part on an earlier Tech Talk series in Feb 2006.

The mobile industry started off with a killer app already available: the desire of people to communicate. Compounded with the fact that for various reasons, the phone was seen as a luxury in India, the mobile gave people in India an independence and freedom that that they had hitherto not experienced when it came to interactions with others. The entry of Reliance Infocomm helped spark off a price war which has led to rocketing growth in the industry.

In India, ringtones, ringback tones, wallpapers, games, voice-based services and SMS infoservices have done very well so far. But they still address a very small segment of the market. There is an opportunity to grow the usage of mobile data (or mobile value added services) beyond the 2G to the 2.5G domain (WAP, MMS and Java) and 3G (streaming services). In India, the mobile has the potential to become a credible alternative for accessing the Internet given the slow growth of connected computers. But for that to happen, a number of things will have to change. With regards to content and value added services, there are three challenges facing mobile businesses: closed publishing systems (“walled gardens”), operator revenue shares for content providers and mobile data pricing.

The walled gardens that mobile operators run limit the options for publishers. They have to go the operators directly or work through intermediaries who have the operator relationships. While the walled gardens are good for operators who can maximize their revenues through the services, it limits the options that users have and, over time, it will also limit the revenue-generation potential.

In India, the content providers get a much smaller fraction of the transaction and subscription fees paid by users compared to that in other markets such as China and Japan. While the operators have a great advantage with their billing relationship and platform, they tend to keep a very high percentage of the revenue thus limiting what content providers keep. In Japan, NTT Docomo’s i-mode pays out 91% to the content provider. In China, the mobile operators pay out 80-85%. In India, the content providers tend to get 10-30% of the revenue only.

Mobile data pricing in India also needs to be reduced dramatically. For example, one of the leading operators charges a fee of Rs 49 ($1.10) per month with an additional charge of 10 paise/10 KB. This works out to about Rs 10 (22 cents) per megabyte of download. This encourages more one-time download applications rather than online usage. In addition, in the GSM world, activating mobile data (GPRS) is also not easy. (By comparison, most CDMA handsets come pre-configured for data access, even though they are limited to the operator walled garden.)
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From the mobile data perspective, what is needed is an open publishing environment which encourages thousands of microentrepreneurs – much like what i-mode enabled in Japan. Operators should open up their walled gardens – they will make for the money lost with far greater data traffic because in India the mobile has the potential to become an alternative device for Internet access.

The Internet and mobile will thus play a complementary role – the small screens of the mobile offset by the full-sized input/output capabilities of the network computer, and the fixed nature of the computer offset by the portability of the mobile phone. India can be the role model for other emerging markets in creating a digital infrastructure which brings information access to hundreds of millions. This is what will change lives. Entrepreneurs will thus have the opportunity to do good and do well.

Over the past year or so, we have been working on a number of ideas relating to the mobile Internet in my company, Netcore. The focus has been on doing the mobile Internet right. I will write about our work and ideas next week.

Next Week: Mobile Internet (continued)