April 7, 2007
I spent a couple of days at BarCampBangalore3 last weekend on the lovely campus of the highly reputed Indian Institute of Management (IIM). I spoke about BigSwerve, my startup, and the Semantic Web in reference to such. People get it and the reaction was great —– and I think they’re starting to understand the Semantic Web as well. There wasn’t much time to really try to explain what the Semantic Web was all about, so I stuck to simple examples of being able to make inferences over data to explain one large difference between the “uppercase” SemWeb and its “lowercase” comrads consisting of things like microformats.
BCB3 was fun — and it was one of the more thought provoking technology gatherings since it incorporated more than just a pure tech focused discussion. There was a lively discussion about India’s future as a provider in a services economy or one in a product economy. I get the feeling that many folks believe a product based approach is more prestigious than that of a service or outsourcer economy.
I interjected, from a somewhat outsider perspective, that the source of innovation is typically close in physical proximity to the source of the need. In other words, the western world typically innovates for the western world itself. And mobile phone are way more ubiquitous compared to personal computer use in India, especially in homes. Until such a time when Indians can innovate for India, it will continue to predominantly be a services based economy.
And it’s not a bad place to be either in my opinion —– some people during the discussion raised the age old argument that all the profits from companies like Nokia get returned to Finland, the respective shareholders, and people outside of India. But they quickly forget the valuable benefits brought on with employment in the local economy and the tremendous wealth being recirculated by such.
