The New York Times writes:

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, about 12 million Americans now maintain a blog. Widgets are elements, often in the left or right columns of a blog, that enhance its usefulness or aesthetic appeal. (The term “widgets,” confusingly, can also refer to compact applications that operate on a computer’s desktop.)

“Widgets pull content or services from some other place on the Web, and put it into your personal page,” said Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures in Manhattan.

Typically, they’re built with Flash software from Adobe, or the JavaScript programming language, which ensures that they work with most Web browsers. Mr. Wilson’s blog, A VC (avc.blogs.com), displays one of the Web’s largest widget collections, including a photo album from the site Flickr and others that highlight his music collection.

Steve Hilton has an amazing graphic.

Daniel Taylor writes about the requirements:

* Improved, enterprise-class help desk and customer support.
* Separation of business and personal liability on mobile devices used in work environments.
* The current inability of IT departments to actively manage mobile users.
* The breakdown of the user/payer model in enabling IT enforcement of corporate mobility policies.
* The cost of international roaming.
* The lack of integration between carrier services for voice and data, even for services delivered to a single device.
* The lack of integration between carrier and enterprise networks for mobile applications.
* The limit of behind-the-firewall connectivity to only a handful of mobile users.

eMarketer writes:

Massive pure-play mobile marketing campaigns will be thin on the ground during 2007. Far more prevalent will be cross-media plays where the direct response capabilities of handsets provide the punch line to a rich media setup in other media such as television, radio or print.

"This year, one of the main challenges for marketers and carriers will be how to evolve a mobile consumer culture that accepts and responds to advertising," says John du Pre Gauntt, eMarketer senior analyst and the author of the new Mobile Marketing and Advertising report. "This will entail knowing what to attempt — as well as what they should definitely not attempt."

Fred Wilson writes:

I am excited to see some new services arriving on the placeblogging scene. Last week we saw the launch of Placeblogger, a new service by Lisa Williams of Watertown's placeblog called H2Otown. Placeblogger, if you don't click on that link and check it out yourself, is a directory of placeblogs. You want to find the best placeblogs in your town? Try placeblogger.

But I am even more excited about Steven Johnson and John Geraci's outside.in. Outside.in is what you'd get if you combined google maps, technorati, and delicious and focused that service on placeblogs. I think outside.in is barely scratching the surface of what it can and should do, but already you can go there, type in your zip code and/or navigate via the map and find blog posts about your town/city/neighborhood.

If the past five years in India were about the mobile revolution, the next five years in India will be about the home computing revolution. The installed base of computers in homes is about 7 million. About 30 million Indians access the Internet from cybercafés. The single largest technology opportunity in India is in getting these users home and spending Rs 400-500 per month on an end-to-end computing solution (device, connectivity and services).

So, what will make the home computing market trajectory over the next five years resemble that of the mobile phone adoption over the past five? I think it will be a combination of multiple elements: making computing available as a service, creating a device that is remotely manageable, centralisation applications, and keeping user data in the network cloud so that it can be accessed from the mobile phone also.

There are two relevant pipes going into homes in India – copper (for telephony), and cable (for television). The Internet can piggyback onto either of these two pipes. What is needed is a device that is both affordable and manageable – a device that does not compromise on performance (as compared to that of a PC as we know it today), and yet is very simple to use and does not rely on piracy to offer applications. The answer, according to me, lies in the use of a multimedia network computer – where the onus of computing and storage is shifted to the server. The server resides at either the telco central office or at the cable head-end.

In this model, it now becomes possible to deliver the complete desktop and all kinds of content and applications to users in a billable manner. Think of this as a value-added services business for home computing, akin to what has happened in mobiles with ringtones, wallpapers, games and the like. Desktop advertising can be controlled from the server-side adding yet another potential source of revenue.

For consumers, it would make things easy and simple. They do not have to become their own IT administrators. They do not have to worry about losing data in case of power cuts (which are still an unfortunate reality in India). They can pay on a per-use basis for a wide range of services – from education to entertainment. This will create the ecosystem of service providers willing to create these services.

2007 will see the early experiments in this category. It will be the first year in the reinvention of computing for emerging markets like India.

Tomorrow: SaaS for SMEs