Chocking the Web 3.0 before it is born

Not sure how many of you are aware if a recent an impending 250 GB bandwidth cap by Comcast starting Oct 1 (http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Comcast-250GB-Cap-Goes-Live-October-1-97294 and http://gigaom.com/2008/08/28/comcast-makes-metered-broadband-official-beware-what-you-download/.) Time Warner is already testing one in Texas with tiered limits as well.

Of course, ISPs are going to want to charge by the GB - it is their scalable revenue model; And why should the ol’granpa pay more or work at a slower speed to check his email once a week.

However, I can see a war erupting between service providers claiming their application is “less bandwidth hungry” or “better HD for the same low-bandwidth”. It is especially going to hit advertisers as now, users will want to only view low-bandwidth ads and will start complaining if a paid service starts to hog their networks with ads and unnecessary information.

In all this, I don’t think there would be any backlash. Possibly, the limits are aimed at very (I mean extremely) heavy users. The kind that would want to constantly download and upload something or the other.

Your comments and thoughts are welcome.

Ram.
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Millions of blogs – one alone matters

Ajita Pattanaik and I worked together in India in the early 90s and then went our ways. He emigrated to the US in 1994 and I in 1996. During this time, Ajita started a software company (www.abvtech.com) and I…well you know me. Neither of us knew where or how to reach the other.

That is until yesterday. Out of the blue, Ajita called me. He had found me thru my blog and my Linked In profile. Because I have been diligently writing blogs for over two years, commenting on other blogs and have been active on LinkedIn, my name pops to the top on Google, Yahoo and Cuil. While this may seem coincidental, it has been a lot of hard work and patience. “Ram Iyer” is a fairly common name in India. There are pages and pages of “Ram Iyer”s on any of the search engine results. So it is quite an honor to be among the top. It took me two years - I asked a lot of people for help, read a number of books on networking, personal development and marketing (among them David Meerman Scotts's The New Rules of Marketing and PR) and discovered techniques from other bloggers.

I intend to publish these tips and tricks on this blog – so keep following. Additionally, I intend to start a mailing list soon. If you are interested, leave me a comment.

Ram. Read more!

And now Web 3.0

I saw this post - Welcome to Web 3.0: Now Your Other Computer is a Data Center - today on TechCrunch, written by Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com. While I have a lot of respect for Marc for what he has done with Salesforce.com being a pioneer, I am a little averse to people just throwing in new terminology without clear definitions.

I am pointing out because my last post was about Web 2.0. Little did I realize that Web 3.0 was already here. However, I do think technology is moving toward Marc's Web 3.0. Applications are already getting sophisticated and useful in the real-sense. We are moving from Web apps primarily for entertainment to Web apps for user applications. Two types of companies will be successful in the Web 3.0 world - one, companies that have (or are planning to) cloud infrastructure and two, companies that build and offer commercial web apps.

These are truly exciting times...

Ram. Read more!