Mr Ram Shriram, a technology industry insider in the US for over 25 years and early investor and founder-director of Google, is the founder and managing partner of Sherpalo Ventures. In Chennai last week, addressing a group of CEOs and later in an interview to Business Line , he commented on how the mobile phone will next take the Internet to a global audience via smart phones, global economy and related issues. Comments:

In this tough global environment have your criteria changed when it comes to investing in start-ups?

Yes; I have become much more cautious. It is hard to be cavalier in this environment, you have to be fairly calculating about what might work, what has decent prospects. We go through that constant arbitrage process.

Your comments on the global economic scenario in the immediate future.

The European crisis continues to fester. It has been brushed under the carpet, or, like a can, kicked down the road… which is let's postpone the crisis for the next year or the year after. And the US crisis has got worse because of the politics and no bills are getting passed. I don't have any great hopes for much action in 2012. We'll probably see two per cent anaemic growth.

Coming to Europe, think of it as a pension problem. Europe is like one giant Museum… you have so many people over 60 who are unable to contribute to the economy, and very few people under 25-35 who have to pay for them. And nobody is willing to take the stand on cutting back on entitlements and benefits for these people. That in a nutshell is the European problem.

In this context, how important is Asia, particularly India, and which regions will drive growth in the coming years?

The Asian region will definitely see investment coming, but India cannot take this for granted. Businesses are following what consumers are doing. The first part of the story is about the globality of the Internet. The growth markets include a large part of Africa and countries you'd have thought are backward. But the double-digit growth is coming from some of the smaller countries… Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Brazil. These are not countries you would have thought of as large growth countries. 10 years ago.

So that's the headline story, only because in some of the other developed markets the core Web-based Internet is saturated and the future story is about the mobile Internet.

Explain “globaility of the Internet”?

It means that empowerment of people. Even in a country like China… the truth is getting told by the people by various means even if the media is completely suppressed. So, enter the Twitter of China, something called the WiBbo. On it, people talk about train crashes directly reported from the scene of the crash so the Government has no time to manipulate the news and present it in their way.

A kid being run over in a street and the head rolling over three four times and the cars just driving by… which is an image of the real China today because everybody is rushing to their jobs, through their lives and they don't have the time to deal with just somebody dying on the road. That got reported on the WiBbo, which you will not see in the Xinhua news agency.

The other big part of the story is that in most of these developing countries, it's really about mobile Internet. They've bypassed physical Internet and gone straight to mobile Internet and there will be two billion plus mobile smartphone data users worldwide in another year. This is more number of people than are being served by electricity grids. They communicate through the cell phone; that is their computer.

User interface is changing too. It started with Qwerty keyboards and then it sort of went into text-based systems. All of you use SMS here. I still see a lot of SMS use in India.

But noticeably this time I had far less SMS spam than I am used to probably because I don't use my India phone that much.

And SMS spam has also been controlled by law here…

Okay, but what I do see is a movement towards sound- or voice-based interaction with your phone. You'll see more of that as well as movement-based and touch-based interaction. For those of you using androids and iPhones, everything is touch-based. This is the future. User interface is going from the world of text-based and graphical interfaces to sound, touch and movement.

You are from the media and another interesting shift is taking place in content delivery. We are used to a world where the content creator was the content controller. People who created content had the right of ownership. Well, that battle, that power, has shifted. Maybe not in India but in many Western markets and it will not be long before it happens here. And it will shift to the aggregator and he will be the controller of what happens.

The example of an aggregator is someone who collects news from around the world on the Internet and then displays it to you in a format that you need to have. All of us like different things. Some may like cricket, some others Bollywood, or local news or international news. Someone else might want to focus on what's happening in Russia.

That customisation is not possible in a newspaper format. It is only possible in an online format and the aggregator can do that best. So that's why you have two or three large aggregators. This means that the cost of content, which in the real world is the cost of reporters, printing presses, delivery, circulation and all that stuff, will only be marginal. In the digital world the marginal cost tends to move towards zero. I fear for that day because the quality of what we read will go down because we won't have really great journalists. I will miss not having the New York Times ten years from now and that will be a sad day.

How come all great innovations – an Apple, Google or Facebook – have happened only in the US and by non-Indians, when we Indians are such tech-savvy, smart people?

I think that will change. One, it is happening in the US because there is a much bigger market there. You can't expect those companies to be built out of India and serve the US market. But we can expect a company to develop out of India that could be a global-scale company, just like Infosys or Wipro was. That was my dream when I came to India 6-7 years ago, wanting to invest in India and I did, in many companies.

But the challenge has been that the Indian market itself hasn't been able to produce to scale for consumption by people in India. Maybe e-commerce might change that. In the world of advertising, so far the largest of those possibilities for me is a scale company, InMobi, which is growing very nicely with many smart Indians from IITs and my hope is that will become a good scale business.

> rasheeda@thehindu.co.in

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