Sramana Mitra has a post by Savita Kini:

Most of the work done today in [Banaglore's] offshore offices, as well as the IT service companies is still the kind or cost reduction work that cannot happen in silicon valley. While definitely there has been some improvement in the kind of work that is happening here, it’s not comparable to the kind of cutting edge research and innovation that happens in Silicon Valley. The new startups are also mostly taking the beaten path as far as technology is concerned. Adding to the already skewed environment, the VCs have been flocking to the city hoping to capture the best deals. To manage their own risk, they continue to invest in late stage deals or in the services model. Some of the deals which happened in the last 1 year have majority been in the dot.com internet companies which my new friend Sramana Mitra calls Concept Arbitrage. I am not passing any judgment here. In a way it’s good because at least the entrepreneurial culture will get reinforced and more risk takers will emerge.

However, to be really compared to Silicon Valley, we need something much broader than the current mixture of IT services & products model.

Fortune calls him the "smartest (or the nuttiest) futurist on Earth."

Kurzweil, however, has something bigger on his mind than just making money - after half a lifetime studying trends in technological change, he believes he's found a pattern that allows him to see into the future with a high degree of accuracy.

The secret is something he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns, and the basic idea is that the power of technology is expanding at an exponential rate. Mankind is on the cusp of a radically accelerating era of change unlike anything we have ever seen, he says, and almost more extreme than we can imagine.

Technology Review writes:

Six months after the launch of his own Zepheira, a consulting company that helps businesses link fragmented data sources into easily searched wholes, Eric Miller's beachside decision seems increasingly prescient. The Semantic Web community's grandest visions, of data-surfing computer servants that automatically reason their way through problems, have yet to be fulfilled. But the basic technologies that Miller shepherded through research labs and standards committees are joining the everyday Web. They can be found everywhere--on entertainment and travel sites, in business and scientific databases--and are forming the core of what some promoters call a nascent "Web 3.0."

Already, these techniques are helping developers stitch together complex applications or bring once-­inaccessible data sources online. Semantic Web tools now in use improve and automate database searches, helping people choose vacation destinations or sort through complicated financial data more efficiently. It may be years before the Web is populated by truly intelligent software agents automatically doing our bidding, but their precursors are helping people find better answers to questions today.

Chetan Sharma provides an update: "# 2006 was a great year for mobile data. Revenues from mobile data were up in all major regions and for all major carriers with data contributing double digit percentage to overall revenues in most cases. The overall subscriptions rose to approximately 2.7B and we should be crossing 3B by the end of 2007. The wireless industry is on its way to gain the quickest billion subscribers within the next 3 quarters. Japan led the way with almost $20B in annual mobile data revenues. US and China were next with $15.8B and $9.2B respectively."

Mark Logan discusses four principles:

1. Embrace User Control
2. Get Personal
3. Optimize for Mobile
4. Provide Value

By Atanu Dey

Imagine for a bit what it would be like if education were provided by private sector firms. Can it be done? Would a socially optimal amount, variety, and quality of education be provided? Would there be market failures? If so, how can those market failures be corrected? Can one devise mechanisms to correct those failures?

The answer to whether the private sector can provide education is clearly ‘yes’ because around the world for a very long time private firms have provided education very successfully. Both private sector for-profit and not-for-profit business models exist. Education, at some level of description, is a service like any of a very large variety of goods and services provided very efficiently by the market. The generalization that markets work holds quite meaningfully in the specific case of education broadly.

It may be worthwhile to briefly expand on what “markets work” means, say, in the context of a good such as computers (both hardware and software.) Basically, there is a demand for computers, or in other words, people are willing to buy them. Firms supply to the market to make a profit. They innovate to increase the variety of the goods to increase their revenues, and figure out ways to reduce their costs so that they have greater profits. Like the large number of profit-seeking firms on the supply side, on the demand side, a very large number of consumers also enter the market with the generalized desire to get the most bang for their buck. The competition that arises from the self-interested behavior of consumers and producers ruthlessly forces unfit computers (and therefore the firms that make them) out of the market and relentlessly drives up the quality and variety, while prices constantly fall.

It is a Schumpeterian world out there – red in tooth and claw. But out of the dance of creative destruction, emerges things that no one—however smart or wise—could have ever predicted. Let me stress that: no one knows what amazing stuff the market will deliver, who will make it, how it will be made, how much it will cost, how it will be improved upon and by whom. Nobody knows, and that includes government bureaucrats or politicians, regardless of how strenuously they claim to know. The inescapable fact is that every innovation, every object that you use, every service that you enjoy, arose overwhelmingly in the private sector, through the risk-taking, imaginative, innovative, entrepreneurial spirit of individuals driven by a basic desire to make a buck.

So is there no role for the government? Yes there is. First, it has to ensure what is called a “level playing field,” to set the rules, to resolve disputes, and maintain such institutions that are necessary for supporting the functioning of the market. Second, in case of market failures (which we will not go into here as this is not a text book on basic economics), to do what it can reasonably do without making the problem any worse. If the government cannot do better than the imperfect markets can, then it is better for us to live with the results of the market failures.

Here then is the basic recommendation that one is forced to make: let the private sector supply educational services in India. The government must not be in the business of providing education at any level. Let the market have a go at it. The government of India is not capable of providing education. It has demonstrated its incapacity over decades, and there is no reason to believe that it is even theoretically up to the job. Education is too critically important for the future of India for it to be left to the government. In today’s world, more than ever, education is a dynamic service. It requires innovation, creativity, entrepreneurial talent, risk-taking ability and human resources—all of which are sorely missing in the government. It is government control of the sector which has had the unfortunate consequence of Indian education to resemble what Keynes’ characterization of education as "the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent."

Let’s imagine what would happen if private sector firms were allowed to provide education, next.

Write to atanudey at gmail.com if you have questions or comments.

Tomorrow: Scarcity