the symptom: popups from ilead.itrack.it were showing up on my homepage - never spotted this myself when surfing from my laptop for some reason!

the cure: got rid of the webstats4u site counter which was the evil force behind the popup. switched to sitemeter.com

• The Future Monitor
• The Long Now Foundation
• Long Bets
• SpringWise
• Trend Watching
• Reveries Magazine
• Cool Hunting
• Wall Street Journal’s Startup Journal

There’s 8 places to look for inspiration and being a visionary!

Now we want everything on the internet to go behind the scenes of all that we are used to.

This is happening with Phones and Videos in particular.

VoIP on your normal phone

Many market players are working on providing us VoIP through normal telephony channels. And they are doing so with attitude and really creative (albeit complicated) ideas. They come up with funny tag-lines like: “taking the phony out of telephony!”

Online Videos on your TV

TiVo could meet Amazon UnBox. Google videos could meet Apples iTV. First they were all worried about piracy - so they wanted us to pay for the videos. Now they want us to be able to see same videos on our regular TVs. It’s all good as long as its significantly  cheaper for me to download a movie rather than buy it in true “flesh-and-blood”.

In both these cases there’s a lot more detail than the headlines tell you. Some phone plans have intricate ways of making calls. The video content has DRM issues. Read more in the links above - and follow the links from that posting. Then you might be running to Rebtel to make ur first free call very soon!

“If this is a race, India has already been lapped”

Cait Murphy, Fortune assistant managing editor argues that this is not necessarily the case. Makes me smile. Makes me think.
He sites two interesting arguments in favour of India:

Political Infratructure:

Being an Indian, this at first ignites a few cynical thoughts. May be he doesn’t know the inside story. He doesn’t know how bad the Indian state of politics is. In my humble opinion, India is making amazing progress despite the political infrastructure rather than because of it. But then, do I really know what China is like? It’s a comparison of relative potential for future development and I am tempted to believe that may be the fact that the economic growth in India is people driven rather than government driven makes it more sustainable. Afterall, politics and government do not operate in isolation from the people of the country. In a democratic setup government will have to respond to the people - even if for their own selfish motives (looking at people as vote banks).

Having said that, I do believe that an IT boom is the beginning but not the pinnacle of the economic “tipping point”. It has been a great first step with the government reacting at its own pace, but appropriately. There’s technology parks in every nook and corner of the country.

The real tipping point would be a agricultural revolution. If I’m not mistaken India still consumes most of its agricultural produce. The majority rural population is still agriculture based and it is the bulk of the vote bank that the politicians care most about. If this population is given a private sector impetus with more opportunites on lines of Sunil Mittal’s plans, then there’s no looking back. That would be our real answer to China’s manufacturing industry.
This dream is best summarized by Mr. Mittal when he says “There is a compelling case for India to feed the world, using inherent strengths that haven’t been exploited at all,”

The politicians haven’t ignored the IT industry, but the political infrastructure has given Indian entrepreneurs their share of grief. Come the next green revolution - the changes wont be overnight, but dare the politicians ignore 80% of their vote bank?

Demonstrable Success:

There goes the classic comparison of China with hardware and India with software. Murphy argues this in the economic sense. No doubt China has the hard infrastructure, but he looks at Indian financial markets and banking which are more progressive. Taking it very literally, the IBM PC’s gone to Lenovo - but IBM Global Services keeps getting bigger in India.

To steal a line from Orange: the future is bright. the future is india.

[Read Murphy’s complete analysis in his Fortune article]

Princeton Infographics [link]

Information posters on global trade and economic data

Google Newsmap [link]

Make a screensaver with the latest google news in an info-map.

Amazon Map/Node/Type [link]

Visual representations of all the entire amazon collection or a selected subset.

Airline travel has recovered from the 2001 fall, and the presidential rating is at its lowest in the last 10 years.

the fine print..

[infosthetics spotted this on his blog]