I attended a W3C conference in Delhi about a fortnight ago. W3C works on developing standards to make the web more pervasive. They have an office at CDAC in Noida. I am pretty certain that in the next decade some of these standards will help produce elephants just as the http standard created a revolution. Besides XML,RSS etc. one standard that is becoming popular is Voice XML.
Most of the technical stuff at the conference was too much for me but the business implications of the stuff being worked on were clear. For anyone who claims to be on the cutting edge technically it would seem to me that being aware of W3C is important.
What is more interesting from an entrepreneurial perspective is to leverage the work at W3C to create elephants. It would also seem that these elephants may not be that infrastructure dependent so the lack of quality infrastructure in India may not prove to be such a bottleneck.
Maybe there are other initiatives like W3C that entrepreneurs in India can leverage or may be W3C is not something that will help. If you have any thoughts on this please comment.
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Standardization opens up several new oppurtunities for entreprenurship. When big companies start adhering to standards, interoperability becomes possible. For example, with the new XML based Office formats (bad example as it is not a standard but the gist is same), there is an oppurtunity to use these formats to create cross platform software that consumes office files. Similarly, as the RSS standard gained wider acceptance, companies like Technorati and Pubsub became possible. If all the IMs (AIM, Skype, Yahoo, MSN etc) started following the same standard opprutunities will arise for creating very interesting applications.
Standardization is essential in order to sell a product. However, one needs to have the capability to build product skeletons as the standard continues to evolve. This way when the standardization arrives, the product is ready.
Obviously there is the risk of the standard never arriving! This is where the ability to spot the right standards comes into play. This problem though is very similar to the problem VCs face when figuring out which ideas+people to back! If one can spot the right one often enough, there are bucks to be made!
The key question in my mind is whether entrepreneurial opportunity (for significant part) exists before or after widespread standardization. All the big boys are plugged in into the standardization effort, and in fact, drive it to their advantage. A key for entrepreneurs is to deliver services before anyone has got there!
In that sense, it might be interesting to keep abreast of standardization activity to understand where the world is going, and where different players are coming from. But, at the same time, preempt on providing the solution.
Thoughts?