I fully expect Baidu and other tech giants on the Chinese shores to try and push the boundaries of technology. Silicon Valley (and the US) in general has always been the hot-bed of innovation. But with enormous increase in wealth in China (and to an extent in India), I can see these companies being more and more ambitious. Not long ago Andrew Ng of Coursera and Stanford AI Lab fame joined Baidu to further their rival to the 'Google Brain' project. Xiaomi has long been positioning itself as a company with design chops of Apple, engineering chops of Google, and e-commerce chops of Amazon, all rolled into one-- and I can see where they are coming from. If they manage to pull it off, I guess that's when we'd start seeing the proverbial "Death of Silicon Valley" as in, it loosing its strange monopoly and strangle hold on tech world in terms of both talent and innovation.

Another interesting development here in India is Flipkart has been attracting top talent from Silicon Valley companies. They're valued at $12bn but have their sights sets on much bigger things. They aren't shying away from claiming they want to be the Indian version of Google. These ambitions are lofty, sure, but aren't without substance. Not to mention the growth the start-up scene has seen in India in light of a few Multi-billion dollar companies (Flipkart, Ola, Zomato, Snapdeal, MuSigma, InMobi, PayTm, JustDial, MakeMyTrip, Info-Edge) springing up in space of last 12-24 months, and more (PubMatic, Zoho Corp, Freshdesk, Knowlarity, Jabong, Housing, Goibibo, CommonFloor, Quickr, Sokrati, Micromax) waiting to enter that exclusive club in the coming 12. With wealth creation at an all-time high in the Indian tech circles, we're seeing an unprecedented situation where a high number of people that aren't afraid of starting their own ventures anymore, enter the start-up world with audacious ideas (with experience and enough talent around them to execute) that once were prerogative of Silicon Valley.

I think Mobile has fueled a much of this revolution (particularly, Android and its low-cost variants). It has made tech and internet available to half-a-billion (or perhaps even more) people in an instant. A local hardware company (Micromax) was recently in the news because it had overtaken Samsung as #1 seller of Smartphones in India.

Either we're about to enter a horrible bubble, or The Times... They're a-Changin'

Nasscom's 10000 startups report: http://goo.gl/KNozT6 (via dropbox)