Trend 1: People Power and Web 2.0:

The web has entered its second generation. As a manifestation of this second-generation Web, today we are witnessing the spawning of user-generated, controlled, and validated content on the Web. Content production tools, from blogging to video sharing, are fully democratized, and the engine for growth is the talent and ability of everyday people, who together are creating a distributed workforce of scale. without precedents.
Each of us has knowledge that is valuable to someone, somewhere.

What does all this mean for Portals and Corporations?

Today’s most successful web companies are building business models around or based on user-generated content.
From Amazon.com to MySpace.com to Craigslist to Wikipedia to Flickr, the most successful companies on the Web today belong to the second-generation Web.

Even for regular veterans like Amazon.com and even companies like NetFlix.com, much of the value comes from their tens of millions of customer reviews. User click tracking on Amazon is used to create better recommendations for those who follow them. A query on Google and the pages one finds relevant give feedback that refines the search algorithms. These companies have found ways to harness the wisdom of the crowd, extracting information that was there all along, latent and lost.

Indian portals have started to realize and notice this trend but have yet to realize the full potential of leveraging the second generation web in their portals. The rate of adoption in these portals is quite slow at the moment. Successful verticals like travel, jobs and marriage in India are also slow moving in this context.

Successful marketplace portals will have an advantage in this regard. But most portals are still trying to figure out the problem of the Second Generation Web and how to make the most of this latest trend of User Generated Content.

They can’t ignore it and are pretty sure of it, but how quickly they adapt to this trend remains to be seen in the Indian context.

Trend 2: Anytime, Anywhere, Any Format, Any Screen – A show is always on

In 2004, viewers tuned in to 2.9 billion music videos streamed from the Yahoo Music site.
In 2005, nearly 25 million unique viewers visited Yahoo Music and viewed 4 billion clips. But it wasn’t until 2006, when record labels began to view Yahoo as an indispensable part of their marketing strategy.

This multi-screen video trend is rapidly catching up in all the nations of the world and India is no exception to this trend. All the major telecom and internet players in India have seen promising growth in the mobile download and internet download market in the past 2-3 years.
The demand for content has prompted portals like Yahoo to create content tailored for all sorts of different screens: first-run TV shows, original content like online soap opera webisodes, and time-sensitive news and sports segments. Once posted, such content takes on a viral life of its own. Recently, STAR India released India’s first webisode for “Pyaar Ke Do Naam”. On March 31, 2006, STAR’s official website Indya.com premiered the channel’s next show ‘Pyaar Ke Do Naam… Ek Radha, Ek Shyaam’ on Indya Tube.

As content companies struggle, hardware manufacturers are also responding to the demand for multiple displays with their own offerings. Apple’s iPod with video and Samsung’s video-enabled cell phones are just the beginning.

Portals like Indiatimes.com in India are well positioned to benefit from this trend. They have a first-mover advantage in this category of business model and expect an increase in their download services based on the short code 8888 in the coming months.

Many other portals in the new segments and travel segments have been quick to embrace this latest trend. Recently, irctc.co.in launched a mobile-based train ticket booking feature to make booking easy through all types of devices and login screens.
However, the portals in India still have time to catch up with this new trend. One reason is that leading corporations around the world are still working to try to figure out the details regarding the demand patterns of these new multi-screen consumers.

This move to anytime, any screen content will also encourage portal players and other creators to post their products on third-party sites like Yahoo, Google and iTunes.

Trend 3: Personalize it

Amazon.com uses purchase histories and page views to create a unique web page that includes recommendations tailored to your liking. Netflix looks at past DVD rentals and suggests future options. Apple’s iTunes and Google Video are producing radio and television out of the broadcast era and into the dawn of individualized media.

Today, whether it is buying jeans, shoes, cosmetics or booking a travel service online, the era of consumer products tailored to personal tastes is rapidly catching up.
Personalization is still the exception in durable goods, but it has become the rule online.

This trend has driven the adoption of various types of personalization techniques in portals. Techniques like collaborative filtering, choice matrix, and fuzzy set matching have become a necessity rather than a fad in portals.

With increasing pressure on content creation, portals are increasingly differentiating their content based on various tools and techniques to personalize content.

Trend 4: Buy it now! Takeover is the new endgame

The old school approach is to build a great R&D department and put smart minds at the helm and let them come up with something innovative. But today, more and more corporations around the world have realized that blue sky research is quickly becoming a drag on the bottom line. They are increasingly taking an alternative route that saves them money, saves them additional pain, and gets someone else to do the sweaty work for them.

And as a solution, more and more corporations around the world have begun buying up small businesses that are already succeeding in a new market.

Cisco took this approach a long time ago, acquiring 107 companies over a 12-year period ending in 2005, becoming one of the world’s most valuable technology companies in the process. The network equipment manufacturer continues to break into new markets. To expand its presence in the digital living room, Cisco spent $6.9 billion last year, nearly double its total R&D budget, to buy cable box maker Scientific-Atlanta. This is R&D by M&A.

This trend is now evident across the globe in all industries, especially in the online world. In 2005, News Corporation entered the social media fray with its $580 million purchase of MySpace’s parent company. In May this year, it bought online karaoke player kSolo.com and news aggregator Newroo. eBay last year spent $2.6 billion on the Skype voice over IP player. Due to booming ad revenue, Google and Yahoo have a combined $4.3 billion in cash and cash equivalents, and they aren’t afraid to spend big. In the past 18 months, Google has gobbled up Dodgeball, Urchin Software, and Upstartle, entering mobile social networking, web analytics tools, and web-based word processing. Yahoo went on its way, gobbling up Konfabulator, Webjay, Upcoming.org, Flickr, and del.icio.us. Now the company offers interface widgets, online playlists, an event tracking service, and photo and bookmark sharing. Microsoft, on the other hand, expanded its dominance by acquiring a staggering 24 companies in the last year or so, including bookmarking startup Onfolio.

Meanwhile, small internet companies are eager to get on the auction block. In the Indian internet space, this trend will also gain momentum in the coming months. Consolidation will soon start to happen in verticals like online travel. This space is already filling up, with almost all new players offering the same service model. Soon the big players will gobble up the small startups and the travel market will mature further in the coming months in India.

The IPO market has been weak since the bubble burst, and new regulations have made exit strategy a costly and cumbersome affair for new players. So the new endgame is full takeover, and it will indeed be a win-win situation.

Trend 5: Open standards and open access technology are the order of the day

Today, openness has become a fundamental business principle, but its value has not always been so obvious. In the 1970s and 1980s, the favorites were companies like Oracle and Microsoft. They tried to turn their proprietary technologies into de facto standards. Owning the standard made it a dominant company, allowing it to dictate how customers used its products. With each new product cycle, customers had to remove old apps and install new ones, and companies that sold accessories had to struggle to update their products.

Then came the Internet, the apotheosis of open standards. Applications now no longer needed to be written with their own user interface to run locally on Windows, Mac OS, or Unix. The browser window became the default interface for everything from trading to network management to stock trading to email. Once installed on a provider’s server, updates were immediately available. And the open environment fostered competition, driving continuous improvements.

We now have Salesfore.com, which offers software through a browser window. The model has been so successful that salesforce.com has recently expanded its reach to offer its services on mobile devices as well. The company’s revenues are growing at more than 50 percent a year, and rivals such as Oracle and SAP are taking cues from its strategy.

Now companies are taking this software-as-a-service model to the next level by making public the instructions that control certain internal operations. For example, users can access Amazon.com or eBay servers to create their own store. Similarly, one can combine Google Maps with photos from Flickr. SOA, XML, web services are defining the winners in today’s web space.

Terminating ownership results in better and cheaper software for everyone and the advantages of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) are becoming more and more obvious to tech players around the world. While online providers open up their servers in search of profit, programmers have embraced open source licenses for idealistic reasons.

However, closed systems are not obsolete yet. They still rule on game consoles and handheld devices. And the telecommunications and cable TV industries seem reluctant to adapt to the changing technological environment.

Still, the power of openness is driving efficiencies and improving results across the entire business ecosystem. The way forward is clear: start with an open door.