Gunjan Sinha

Chairman, Entrepreneur

At the eve of TIECON, I wanted to share my thoughts on where I see the opportunities in the coming years for entrepreneurs who are ready to venture out on their own. These are unprecedented times for entrepreneurs and investors who are willing to address the challenges and opportunities in the future.

Opportunity #1: Delivering Intelligent Services

The next ten years is going to see rise of intelligent knowledge-driven services, which bring deep domain and market understandings coupled with technology excellence. Companies and entrepreneurs who combine domains and markets with technical strength, and leverage global organizational models from India, China, US to bring the best talent together will rise to the top. Traditional IT services, BPO services will give way to more advanced KPO services (Knowledge process outsourcing services). Entrepreneurs should look at these services in areas, where there is deep domain and market understanding requirement, yet, companies internally are not able to do a good job by themselves. A great example would be for example, to create a company focused on delivering market research services through facebooks, linkedin and other popular social networks. Market research is a well-understood concept; we now have new platforms where large numbers of consumers are aggregating. How do we create the next generation market research services company? These kinds of intelligent services present real business opportunities for next generation entrepreneurs.

Opportunity #2: Building Knowledge Networks

First generation social and professional networks (like Facebook, LinkedIn) have created large platforms for individuals and businesses to aggregate on the web. As we look ahead, one would see the formation of new class of professional and social networks, which are very targeted knowledge networks, bringing together knowledge holders and knowledge seekers to exchange ideas, innovations, and advise in ways that create true value for all participants. SiliconIndia.com is trying to build such a knowledge network; there will be rise of many more of these networks in different vertical and niche domains. I do not envision that the horizontal platform networks like Facebook, LinkedIn will be able to do a good job addressing the niche areas of these knowledge networks.

Opportunity #3: Towards Clean and Green consumers and enterprises

Consumers in the future will live self-regulated lifestyles to reduce their carbon footprint. US per capita carbon emission are 6.8 tons per year, China 1.1, India 0.5 tons per year. There will be opportunities in creating technologies for alternative energy, but there will be equally significant opportunities for entrepreneurs who aspire to build IT/Software systems and web services to help consumers or businesses to better manage their carbon footprint. These new class of applications will provide true opportunities for education, management and self regulation around carbon footprint management, emission controls, environmental social responsibilities and much more. So, to those entrepreneurs who are keen to participate in the clean and green revolution, but do not want to give up their software or web focus, can definitely investigate these kinds of compelling applications for the future. Of course, if you happen to have the technical or business background to fundamentally create new technologies for green house gas reduction or alternative fuels, you are surely in good timing, as VCs and investors are keen to place significant bets in this arena. I would also urge entrepreneurs to learn from the clean and green innovation happening in number of Chinese companies (specially on the solar energy side), who are now beginning to create significant scale, through their strong manufacturing advantages. We cannot limit ourselves to merely looking at developments in US or India alone. China is a big player in clean and green and a number of great companies are emerging from china. Climate change, energy crisis is a global issue; hence entrepreneurs who plan to venture in this area must research and study the opportunity from a global perspective.

Opportunity #4: Finding Opportunities in Social Good

A lot has been discussed lately on opportunities in bottom of the pyramid. Recent announcement from "Tata Nano" on Rs 1 Lakh car has put the 100 year old Tata group on the world map, building an affordable car for the masses. Similarly, microfinance companies are spawning new opportunities to serve the poor and the underserved. In a recent announcement at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Bill Gates highlights the notion of "creative capitalism" to address the needs of the underserved. I guess, we now know, what Bill Gates is upto, now that he is officially off his day-to-day duties at Microsoft. Budding entrepreneurs can target social entrepreneurial causes, with hybrid models of for-profit and non-profit, creating a double profit line of social good and economic profits. Immense opportunities exist for the bold and the brave to look under the hood, looking beyond the obvious high growth, high paying consumers or enterprises to discover new markets and needs which can be sustainably addressed through entrepreneurial energy in the long-tail of the human population, living under $2/day incomes. Microfinance (lending capital) for accelerating rural entrepreneurship has now opened up a range of new entrepreneurial ideas..Some of which are obvious and merits deeper investigation. For example, in India, micro insurance might be ripe for the taking, or helping improve the "food supplies" for the road-side "dhabas" and turning them into "subway" style branded cooperative might be worth studying..or if you are looking for bolder thoughts, how to leverage village internet kiosks into a game changing economic growth engine for the rural economy. At this time of the evolution of India, and other such developing nations, we need far more entrepreneurs and students of rural economy to help us unearth these hidden gems of creative capitalism. A number of promising Internet ventures like Kiva.org are leading the path to transform the lives of the poor. Skoll foundation, and Omidyaar foundation (founders of eBay) are also doing great work in this area. Organizations like Unitus (http://www.unitus.com) are also supporting many social ventures with hybrid models of profits and social good.

Opportunity #5: Leading the Web 3.0 wave

Web 1.0 was about publishing and “finding and communicating” with users. It was about HTML, Server side computing. Web 2.0 was about collaboration and social web applications. Mobile and cell phone primarily remained as a separate network. It was about Client side technologies like Ajax and JavaScript which became popular to create new UI models for users.

Moving forward, Web 3.0 will be about “Platform as a service” enabling killer apps, which will bring 3D, Video/Broadband, virtual networks, mobile web into a seamless web. Web 3.0 will be about creating semantic linkages between web pages and information. It will be about intelligently personalizing the web experience in ways that we have not seen before. Thousands of “applets” or widgets from across the web can come together to present you content and applications through a very personal web experience. Web user interfaces in the past were being stitched together by developers. Moving forward the user experience will be automatically and dynamically stitched together for the user based on their profile and preferences. For example, if I happen to be passing through Hong Kong, my news will automatically get customized to share more articles from that region, my iGoogle page will start to carry more interesting articles on Chinese food or culture. Or, if I am using a service for online shopping, it automatically knows my social or professional profile (from facebook) and customizes the offerings to my preferences.

In the next 7 years, by 2015, we will have more than 3 billion people on the Internet, up from 1 Billion today. By such time, Internet will be always on, wireless, pervasive connecting 3 Billion consumers, all manufactured products, all media forms with full “personal awareness” of location, preferences. Enterprises and Governments will also learn from the consumer web in how it embraces the web to operate as fluid and agile teams. Web 3.0 will fuel an innovation economy, a new convergence of economics, democracy, trade and technology; it will determine the future leadership of nations, productivity of business and wealth of individuals. Internet will better enable cross-cultural understanding than it has ever done before by collapsing the language and cultural barriers. We need English, Hindi, Chinese and German speakers to seamlessly communicate with each other in the Web 3.0 world. Bottom of the pyramid will embrace the web 3.0 through compelling Applications for people living under $2/day incomes, fundamentally leading to more prosperity and diffusion of information, knowledge and wealth.

As I mentioned earlier, we are living in an unprecedented era of change brought together by the web itself, by the opportunities of the global economy, by the rising energy and resource crisis, and by the desire to impact billion of people from the bottom of the pyramid who are currently being excluded from the wealth explosion. Hope these trends and opportunities will spur your entrepreneurial thinking as we prepare ourselves for the TIECON later this month.