For a change I made my prediction public on the blog unlike my mostly private observations of many other technology trends. With facebook said to be valued at 15 Billion USD, social networks are flying high on the radar screens. Now Sequoia Capital's 7 million investment into Minglebox looks like a possible future winner.

mginger.com is a new mobile consumer site targeted at mobile ad marketers to reach willing end-users at a fairly low cost and with an added incentive for users to control what communication they want to receive and get a part of share from the marketing budget. I haven't tried their service so I don't know how it works this are just my thoughts on this revenue model.

UPDATE: Looks like mginger folks are a bunch of hardcore spammers. I see a lot of popular news sites spammed by them/their affiliates.

For a long time I considered that people should pay me(revenue share with the site operator) to view my profile/resume on a resume/social networking site and this might make some model. Very logically people should pay me for viewing the ads/clicking on ads, pay me to send me "SPAM" I want. Yes the barrier to entry to mginger.com is still very low.

This is one of the democratic solutions for click-fraud, un-wanted spam on mobile phone space especially in a country like India where implementation of privacy related laws is weak. I remember a domestic BPO ( which shall remain un-named ) trying to hire me as a business development head for their 'crown-juice' verified telephonic database (with so much more information about you than you can imagine ). Their answer to my question as to how do they get their 'raw' information was 'I don't want to know that'.

A solution I had been in mind for mobile phone spam was to create an addressbook backup/synchronization service which runs on the phone or the server side using a direct SS7 link to each mobile phone operator and stores 10-100 numbers, depending on the size of the addressbook which show up as SPAM1, SPAM2 numbers(stored in the addressbook itself for more popular spammers) and whenever an un-solicited caller calls who is not in the addressbook of the user can mark it as a name SPAM in the addressbook and that gets synchronized into the addressbook backup's central database and gets pushed to all the other users of the service. Kind of like Vipul's Razor for Un-solicited calls.

Maybe a combination of the two approaches is a space for yet another mobility startup.

Update: Later I found this startup bankaro.com that implements the above idea of telephone spam filtering using a trusted network.

Nasscom organized workshop on Escaping Early Stage Traps. The workshop was well received by a fairly diverse audience with almost 50% audience consisting of early stage entrepreneurs apart from services companies folks looking to enter product business, a few salespeople, recruiters and Investors. The panel consisted of

* Anal Jain (Chair)
* Prat Moghe (Co-chair)
In addition to the above two anchors, NASSCOM has invited the following experts from the product ecosystem to share their experience.

* Vishwas Mahajan, CEO, Compulink Systems Ltd.
* Samir Palnitkar, VP, AirTight Networks

Quite a few interesting conversations happened both inline and offline during the workshop.

Anal and Prat did an extremely good job of explaining the early lifecycle objectives of a startup. Samir and Vishwas shared interesting insights on their experience of running product startups in India. The key takeaways were not much different from whatever has been already said and explained in Barcamps happening across India in terms of content. Ofcourse there was a lot of value in meeting a lot of interesting people at one place.

Finally www.mixercast.com formerly www.nanocast.com has been launched after almost an year of near stealth.
More on this later.

It is truly built on a foundation of technology built by innovative players who came before us. The central idea is as simple as "Remix the web" just as you remix your music. There are dreams of world domination, of erasing war and poverty and increasing the empowerment by several levels for Rich media publishing on Internet. You need Flash Player 8 or above to try out mixercast though.
Flash Player 9 for Linux can be downloaded from Adobe.

Full-Disclosure: I work at Nanocast Labs, however the views expressed on this post and this blog are my own.