Parisista

As the year 2009 comes to close, it’s time to reflect on what has been done and also the time to dream what the world is going to achieve. Personally, I came back to India after a gap of almost a decade and have been playing catchup; trying to understand the changing business here with a perspective. Dreaming of things what could be achieved here,  I thought I would throw some predictions for 2010 in the desi kitchen bag. Here is my list:

1. A traditional media company or a telco acquires a 3-year young technology start up in the INR 100 crore range
2. A mobile telco launches a domestic anywhere to anywhere unlimited talk time plan (long shot: for INR 3999/month)
3. Indian internet users climbs up to be in the Top 5 spot in their share of online piracy. Positive is the surge in Internet usage.
4. Infosys/TCS/Wipro launch initiatives to align their interest with the startup ecosystem in India (the offering may be on the lines of Microsoft Bizspark, Sun ‘Startup Essentials‘)
5. Amazon CloudFront Content delivery network (CDN) launches an Edge location in India
6. Government of India passes the legislation to legalize Voice Over IP (VOIP) traffic originating within the country and terminating to a local telephone
7. The Indian Advertising community tries to block sales of Tata Sky Plus (DTH Recorder/Indian Tivo) as they realize that people are skipping ads
8. 2 kids from an engineering college launch a brand new search engine and get international investments/coverage
9. Amazon.in starts their online commerce operations, whereas Techcrunch kick-starts their Indian operations with a post on how they acquired their squatted techcrunch.in domain
10. Reserve Bank of India launches a parallel payment network for credit and debit transactions; takes Visa & Mastercard head-on

The thumbnail is of Orion Nebula, favorite amongst amateur astronomers and casual sky watchers. It is one of the closest star formation regions from Earth at a distance of 1,500 light years.