Big leap forward: Take a peek at top 5 Internet trends tracked by Rajan Anandan, Google India MD

If the words of one of the most influential digital media experts are to be believed, mobility will be the most compelling trend going forward, followed by other exciting ones like natural UI, video interface, social media and so on. According to Rajan Anandan, the managing director of Google India, mobility is currently the biggest trend for consumer-driven businesses, as well as enterprises.

Speaking at NASSCOMM's EmergeOut, an annual event for technology entrepreneurs (this year, the theme was Taking A Big Leap) recently held in Gurgaon, Anandan discussed the upcoming trends that the IT industry, as well as future companies, could leverage.

Mobility is the next big thing: Currently, the most crucial Internet trend is mobility, says Anandan. India will cross the 300 million mark of Internet users by 2015 and most of them would be accessing the Net via mobile devices. "In fact, new businesses will be built on the mobile platform first and some will be on mobile only," he noted.

Voice & retina interfacing: If mobility is of topmost interest, next comes natural user interface, he noted. Substituting keyboards or touchscreens with voice would be the way to go in future. Data entry through voice and search through retina – that's what the Internet would be like in the years to come. "Natural user interface creates enormous opportunities in a country like India as around 500 million people are still not literate here, going by the basic definition of literacy, and not more than 150 million Indians speak English. For them, interacting on the Internet via voice will be the biggest thing," he stated.

Video (sans bandwidth issues): Next in line is video, of course. According to Anandan, out of the 2 billion Internet users across the globe, 60 per cent people use online videos in a big way. "Five years from now, every website will be 90 per cent video. However, for video-enabled sites, the most basic problem is bandwidth. If you want to build a billion-dollar company in India, solve the problem of video on very low bandwidth," he told the audience.

Business re-invention via social media: The fourth trend is social. The innovation wouldn't be there in building another social networking site but in leveraging businesses around social networking. Building businesses like music streaming, travel or any other industry using social networking will help re-invent products/services.

SMBs as biz enablers: Finally, the small and medium businesses (SMBs) could be ruling the future. "After mobile, SMBs happen to provide the single largest opportunity for building business and scaling up," he pointed out. The next multi-billion-dollar software or Cloud companies could be built off SMBs. Since these are the link between enterprises and startups, SMBs would make available a huge resource for startups and a huge opportunity for enterprises. And last but not the least, deep capability and knowledge of what the businesses are trying to solve are required to thrive in any space, summed up Anandan.

(Edited by Sanghamitra Mandal)