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:
- A traditional media company or a telco acquires a 3-year young technology start up in the INR 100 crore range
- A mobile telco launches a domestic anywhere to anywhere unlimited talk time plan (long shot: for INR 3999/month)
- 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.
- 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‘)
- Amazon CloudFront Content delivery network (CDN) launches an Edge location in India
- Government of India passes the legislation to legalize Voice Over IP (VOIP) traffic originating within the country and terminating to a local telephone
- The Indian Advertising community tries to block sales of Tata Sky Plus (DTH Recorder/Indian Tivo) as they realize that people are skipping ads
- 2 kids from an engineering college launch a brand new search engine and get international investments/coverage
- 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
- 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.