Cloud for Consumers in Japan and India

I am sitting at Bangalore airport, having spent the day at nasscom and the previous week in Japan. A little homesick and exhausted.

One thing which hit me in Japan and here is the number of people talking about cloud. At first I dismissed it as people following the buzz. But it seemed to be deeper than that.

One thing very different about India and Japan is that they are phone centric. When people start a company in India they think mobile, not PC. In this world cloud means VAS or value added services on the mobile network.

Those services have always lived in the cloud. Imagine a headline like “Your phone will backup your computer to the cloud”. It is the complete opposite of what we would think in the US “your computer will backup your phone”.

Phone based services have always lived in the cloud. As netbooks and things like kindle which connect to the phone network by default OR if the connectivity is provided by the same companies the notion of cloud based services changes.

So we may find in a copuple of years that the cloud is a telco or mobile operator thing with countries like Japan and India way ahead in consumer adoption while the US is ahead in enterprise adoption.

Wonder which one will be bigger?

Cloud Flavors

Software as a Service (SAAS)
Salesforce.com (sales application)
wush.net (svn)

Platform as a Service (PAAS)
Java
Google App Engine
Rails
Joyent
Heroku
EngineYard
Python
Google App Engine

http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonHosting

.net
Azure

Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS)
Amazon EC2