Happy 2007 everyone! This year, new years eve wasn’t very exciting for me. I’ve had a pretty bad case of the flu for the past 3 days and as a result have been stuck at home. Clearly 2007 hasn’t gotten off to a great start for me but I’m sure the rest of the year will be much better.

So let’s see, as one of you pointed out to me, it’s been almost six weeks since my last post. As I said in that last post, I was leaving for a family vacation to Germany and India. The trip was pretty cool. Unfortunately, I didn’t bring a camera with me so the only pictures I have are those off of my sister’s camera. I’ll post a link once my sister puts them online. Germany struck me as the most similar to the US compared to the all the other European cities I have been to. In terms of tourist destination, Germany is not really that great in my opinion. My sister and I agreed that Munich looked like it was one big Disneyland set. The reason is that while much of Munich is newish construction, the architecture is made to look very classical German. So what you get is a bunch of new, old-looking streets. As for Berlin, the (20th century) history in the city is pretty amazing. Our hotel was literally spitting distance from what one of the last remains of the Berlin Wall. All over the city you find points of recent historical signficance. After Germany, we spent time in India visiting family.

One thing from my time in India that really struck me was how the Internet is still just beginning to make an impact in the daily life of the average college-educated young Indian adult. In India, you’re basically looking at 100kbps DSL as the best broadband in the home - and from my experience it’s flaky even at this low speed. Few of my cousins - even those that are in the tech industry - blog or socialize much online. Sharing photos much less videos on the Web is not big at all there, I’m assuming because the Internet speeds at home are so poor.

From a mobile standpoint they are quite advanced though. It’s typical to see that every family member has a cell phone and in fact many households use a wireless local-loop service that replaces the land-line local loop provider (many buildings have really poor phone wiring which makes having a land-line phone pretty useless). Because most homes are built with steel+concrete walls, it seems like 802.11 is basically nonexistant. I didn’t see a single wi-fi hotspot the entire week. Instead, for the few business professionals who need it, tethering your laptop to your cell phone is more the norm. What’s intersting is that Airtel, one of the popular mobile carriers over there, has a wap portal called Airtel Live, which I noticed many of my relatives using via their cell to get news, stock market notifications, movie times, etc.

It’s almost like India is kind of leaping over terrestial datacom infrastructure and going directly to wireless/cellular infrastructure. Once wireless/cellular broadband shows up in India, I think we’re going to see a really massive explosion in Internet consumption amongst the typical middle-class Indian young adult population - which at xx% of 1+ billion people represents a group of people that likely approaches or even exceeds the entire population of the US. The opportunity over there is pretty mind-blowing.

Anyway, enough about India. Let’s talk 2007. One resolution of mine is to blog more frequently. In the past I’ve tried to put some real deep thought into most of my posts. Sometimes that has meant each post taking several hours to write. This has often discouraged me from blogging. While blogging is something I enjoy, I often am short on time. Instead, from now on I intend to post more of my daily observations and when I do feel like writing in-depth about a topic, I will break it up into a series of posts.

Actually, I have more updates for y’all but in accordance with the aforementioned resolution, I will save it for my next post. =)