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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

Mobile Computing A New Turn-on for VC Eyes

Amit Sudarshan
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Amit Sudarshan
Large demographic, economic, and technology shifts are migrating computing usage to mobile devices with data and software hosted within a computation cloud. While the success of mobile applications has been a sudden surprise for many U.S. based firms, it was predicted by the success of mobile and SMS based applications in India and in South East Asia. Successful Indian companies such as JustDial are leveraging their learnings in the Indian mobile space, as they start their U.S. operations. Much of this progress has been good for the consumer; however, the unfortunate trend towards proprietary app stores with stringent review procedures has decreased consumer choice and increased development risk.

Amazon Kindle was the first device of its kind to bundle wireless service with the price of purchase. The ability of a consumer to have immediate connectivity without invoking a third party carrier became one of the main selling points for the device, and it significantly improved the user experience. The bundling of connectivity with purchase is going to be the next ‘killer app’ for embedded devices. We expect to see innovative new devices that take advantage of ubiquitous connectivity, as well as an ecosystem of software vendors that support the myriad regulatory and technical challenges associated with managing the network.

Taking a longer-term view, technology in the semiconductor industry is ripe for transformation. The progression of Moore’s Law will soon require transistors beyond the physical limitations of silicon-based transistors. New materials, techniques, and equipment will need to be devised to achieve this, and we are keenly following the developments in graphene as a material capable of solving these and many other problems. Additionally, solid-state storage devices, the wide deployment of the GPGPU, and innovation in advertising formats, have always remained an exciting sphere to follow.

And with these abundant opportunities available, there is no better time than now to be an entrepreneur. Times of uncertainty create opportunity, and are generally the times when great companies are founded. Half of the Fortune 500 companies were founded in a recession or bear market. That said, it does not mean that building a successful startup in a recession is easy. I advise you to have patience and persistence, success is unlikely to be immediate or explosive, and will seem at times to be out of reach. However by continuing the daily process of building your business step by step, you will eventually have built something you can be proud to say is yours.

The author is Senior Analyst, Illinois Ventures
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