dsushant

Internet penetration in India is at the lower end of your estimate - 124 million in 2012 (1).

In contrast, the wireless subscriber base was 875 million in 2013 (2).

Source: 1. “Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia's Next Superpower” by McKinsey; Published 2013 2. TRAI: Highlights on Telecom Subscription Data as on 31st October, 2013

The mobile industry body GSMA's Rich Communications Services (RCS) initiative seems relevant in this context.

"joyn services enable customers to chat and enrich messaging or voice calls by exchanging images or video simultaneously during calls, in a private and secure manner, with any member of their contact list that has joyn, regardless of the user’s network or mobile device. Additional services such as voice over IP (VoIP) or IP-video call will be introduced in the near future. These services may be used on both the operators’ mobile networks and on Wi-Fi networks." (Source: http://www.gsma.com/newsroom/spanish-mobile-operators-launch...)

http://www.gsma.com/futurecommunications/rcs/ http://www.joynus.com

Company culture can definitely be changed, either by a handful of motivated team mates or by one effective leader. For an example of the latter approach, read this book: "American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company" by Bryce G. Hoffman.

marcopolo: Wondering if you have similar data security concerns regarding SMS, especially those received via an SMS gateway?

While the article does not talk about it, one major difference between pre & post internet social networking is the effort intensity. The internet has trivialized the effort required thereby significantly diminishing the quality of conversations.

Resource intensity in itself is unlikely to deter entry. A key factor determining industry concentration is the potential for economic profits (rents). You seem to be referring to electric utilities - while regulation is a more plausible entry barrier, the proximate cause is more likely the dearth of rents.

What are the implications for Free Zone users, Google, the carriers, advertisers, websites, and phone OEM’s?

1. Free Zone users can access their favorite Google communication tool (G+ / Gmail) and search. 2. Google gets to serve its ads on all these properties, apart from valuable usage data and improving its products (the more people search on Google, the better its results, etc). 3. Carriers have two obvious benefits – acquisition and/or retention of price sensitive users seeking free access to G+/Gmail/Google Search and acquiring users for data plans. Another benefit could be revenue sharing for lead generation via Google’s ads. The wild card with the carriers is to launch sponsored browsing as a product – where anyone could sponsor access to one/more web services. 4. Advertisers have a compelling incentive to allocate budgets for Google’s Ad Words product. 5. SEO wars will be taken to a new level. 6. The days of feature phones with no internet access could be numbered. In the optimistic (for Google) scenario, Free Zone will increase demand for low end internet enabled phones. And OEM’s will gleefully comply.

Note - Extracted from my blog: http://u2697.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/sponsored-browsing-and...

Every Olympic medal winner is an expert at his/her sport. Given that attaining expertise requires about 10 years of "deliberate practice" under the supervision of a capable coach, the deficiencies in India's sports management come under focus: 1. The lack of native coaches is evident from the need to depend on foreign coaches. This leads to obvious challenges for an aspiring sportsperson. For instance, many potential sports persons may just not be talent-spotted. 2. The incentives to pursue a career in sports are weak: The middle classes - who can think of funding their child's sports ambition - usually give in to the fear of being excluded from a "regular" career, usually based on education qualification.

That's a good perspective. Monetization would thus depend on whether attention & intent are aligned - true in the case of Google search but not so with FB & Twitter.

Well, Dalton Caldwell is asking: http://join.app.net/

> If you cannot afford to live yourself, I expect the cows won't have much of a life either. But that's just an assumption.

That's a fair assumption for a commercial operation. In India, small holders (2-3 cattle) are in majority & the primary use is for tilling fields. Consequently, cattle are considered & treated as family members, rather than as milk producing machines. Even if the farmer has to live frugally, he/she does not ill treat cattle.

> It is a good question though, and especially timely as the Canadian government is seriously leaning towards scrapping the quota system entirely.

Thanks for that info - will be interesting to assess the outcome if the shift happens.

I believe the Canadian government does not subsidize dairy farming while the USA does so. Specifically, farmer's cooperatives in Canada have self imposed quotas while in the USA, there are no quotas but there are subsidies. Do you think this creates different incentives, resulting in different cattle rearing practices?

You are on the right track. Couple points to round it off: 1. Dalton is questioning the dominant business model online & fired his first salvo via join.app.net. 2. As a vocal spokesman for a pro-user & pro-developer platform design, he's got to rally his forces. No wonder he is gunning for the big ones - the first indication was his response to Fred Wilson's post (http://daltoncaldwell.com/fred-wilson-is-wrong-about-free).