Ajit Balakrishnan, founder and CEO, Rediff.com, is the author of The Wave Rider, A Chronicle of the Information Age. You can e-mail the author at ajitb@rediffmail.com
Neither pharma nor IT would have become the stars of the economy without the active but largely invisible hand of the Indian State, says Ajit Balakrishnan.
Facebook owns WhatsApp and Microsoft owns Skype, the two services that are at the centre of the current "net neutrality battle".
The Information Technology Act needs another tweak to allow a different kind of information intermediary to flourish, says Ajit Balakrishnan.
India needs to build an economic system that will provide adequate capital to budding entrepreneurs, says Ajit Balakrishnan.
The step forward in marketing could be a move to bypass the media and towards owning it directly, says Ajit Balakrishnan.
May be the strong United States growth will lead the world back to a period of growth and help us all put this painful recrimination behind us.
It is only gradually dawning on us that some of the information we have trustingly shared with commercial service providers can be used against us when we apply for a job or when we apply to admission to a college, says Ajit Balakrishnan.
What will it take to get India's poor broadband penetration to be seen as a problem and not as a condition, thus enabling real, serious e-commerce to take off in India?
A new generation of scholars -- this time, sociologists and anthropologists, who hitherto have been busy with researching social practices of primitive tribes and social structures like India's caste system -- are starting to cast their eyes on the financial sector.
Content marketing is perhaps part of the tectonic shift that is under way in media with the advent of the web, says Ajit Balakrishnan.
The international investors who are investing, merging and shaping India's new ecommerce start-ups are betting that if China can produce an Alibaba with an expected market value of $ 170+ billion market value when it does its IPO, India should produce at least one or two with a $5bn+ market value, says Ajit Balakrishnan.
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In India, the need to find a solution for the jobs problem is perhaps even more urgent considering the oft-quoted number of a million young people arriving every month looking for jobs.
Some 800 million or more Indians gaze at their mobile phones all day. Whoever can crack what's news on the mobile phone for them and their families, for a nominal payment of Rs 10 a month, is a winner, says Ajit Balakrishnan.
The government is by far the largest employer; job security is guaranteed for government employees, and their wages are set through once-in-10-year Pay Commission.
The e-commerce marketplace is like an information intermediary these days.
Now, the world over, policymakers are dusting off their copies of Keynes' classic, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, and figuring out whether there are any answers there to our own challenges of growing our economies.
By buying The Washington Post in his personal capacity, the Amazon founder and internet pioneer may just be looking to save an American institution.
Whether history will remember Edward Snowden as a traitor to his country or as a champion for free speech and less intrusive government is hard to tell, but the issues he has brought into focus need deep thought, writes Ajit Balakrishnan
Things like the increase in worker diversity can only be all to the good, but what about the steadily rising proportion of 'temporary' workers? Asks Ajit Balakrishnan.
The massive buyers of gold in the past two years have not been the distressed farmers or the manual scavengers, writes Ajit Balakrishnan.
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