ReadWriteWeb

One year ago this week, Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was traveling throughout India meeting with local technologists and vacationing. Reporters wanted to know, what was he doing there? Speculation that a Facebook India would soon launch was inevitable.

Apparently, earlier today Facebook users in India were greeted with a new message upon logging in: Facebook is now available in Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam. As of 2001, (the latest numbers available) those languages had a combined 770 million speakers. Facebook has just over 200 million users, so this could be a huge opportunity for growth if the company can pull off more than just interface translation.

For the sixth in our investor interview series, we went east to India to chat with Alok Mittal, a partner at Canaan Partners, in the company's office in Gurgaon, India. We got his perspective on early-stage investing and specifically the challenges and opportunities for a venture starting out in India.

The Supreme Court of India has denied legal protection to a 19 year old computer science student facing a lawsuit for comments left on a group page he created on the Google owned social network Orkut, according to The Times of India. Local press has identified the young man by the name Ajith D (a common name) and report that his alleged offense was creating a group page where other visitors left "libelous" comments critical of militant right-wing political party Shiv Sena.

Indians around the internet are condemning the ruling as a blow against freedom of speech and democracy. It certainly appears to be a dangerous misunderstanding of the nature of the internet on the part of the court and a bad precedent in the most populous democracy in the world.

"There are 2.2 billion mobile phones in the developing world, 305 million computers but only 11 million hospital beds," said Terry Kramer, strategy director at British operator Vodafone at the Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona this week. That's why Vodafone, along with the United Nations and the Rockerfeller Foundation's mHealth Alliance have banded together to advance the use of mobile phones to better aid those in need of healthcare in the developing world.

A year ago, I wrote about the State of Innovation in India, keying off an article I had written 10 years previously. Rather than wait another 10 years, ReadWriteWeb has decided to make this an annual review. This time, we have restricted ourselves to web technology. We are looking for breakout innovation, companies creating and getting traction with technology that will change and create markets.

A couple of entrepreneurs out of Kerala, India, are re-envisioning the way that banking is done. Anish Achuthan (26) and Rameena Rabeedin (28), have developed a branchless network consisting of low-cost ATMs, Smart Teller Machines, E-POS terminals, and a mobile banking gateway that lets you perform transactions using your cell phone. The end result of their efforts brings modern banking technologies to semi-urban and rural markets where traditional banks are unwilling or unable to set up ATMs.

Last week, we covered how Zoho is defying conventional wisdom in the Web Office market. But is being unconventional all it takes for a bootstrapped start-up to take on both Microsoft and Google, in head to head evaluations by giant enterprises such as GE? Far from it. Whenever you see a surprising 'overnight sensation', you will usually find years of hard work and careful execution.

In Part 2 of this story, we reveal some of Zoho's cookbook.

Anyone who has followed my posts on ReadWriteWeb, knows that I am interested in how innovation is going global, particularly innovation from India, and that I think P2P is the next great disruptive technology - the only one that could derail the Google steamroller. So it is no wonder that MetaASO caught my eye -- via Pluggd.in, a site that tracks Indian startups.

10 years ago, in 1997, I wrote an article called Playing Against 5 Aces for a technology magazine in India called Dataquest. The article looked at how the deck was stacked in favor of American technology companies, because they were playing with 5 Aces in the pack:

1. A large domestic market
2. Access to intellectual capital
3. Reliable, low cost telecommunications
4. A culture that rewards innovation and risk taking
5. A well developed venture capital industry

Against these 5 Aces, India had only one good card, which was low cost labor. It is interesting to revisit these 5 Aces ten years later in 2007 (well, 2008 now!) and see what it means for the state of innovation in India. In short, India is looking a lot better: