Gauravonomics Blog

Steve Rubel started talking about it yesterday and, within a day, everyone is talking about the web 2.0 bubble -

The bubble really began in earnest when Google bought YouTube. That’s when every person with an entrepreneurial itch woke up and smelled the hype and money. Prior to then, startups were more focused on the entrance, not the exit.

John Heilemann at the New York Magazine argues both sides of the case but fails to make up his mind -

There’s the glut in venture capital: $3.4 billion invested in fledgling Internet firms in 2007, the most torrid pace since the height of the Web 1.0 mêlée. There are those lunatic valuations… There’s the frothy run-up in the NASDAQ… And then there’s the flood of derivative, dum-dum start-ups inducing a severe case of dot-com déjà vu.

Despite some tremors, online advertising is now a juggernaut that promises to only become more powerful as companies like Facebook start creating sophisticated networks where fine-grained behavioral targeting is possible. More than 1.3 billion consumers around the world now use the Internet, and the global growth curve is steep. Meanwhile, the main source of unbridled mania in the nineties, IPOs, are a non-factor this time around. Instead, the boom is being driven by giants with riverine profit flows and vast reservoirs of cash.

Wipro Technologies has become possibly the first Indian company to join the virtual web community Second Life by opening a Offshore Development Centre model campus called Innovation Isle (via agencyfaqs!). While Second Life is surely a marginal force in the Indian context, Wipro’s move might encourage other IT companies to flirt with it. Watch out this space for more.