The startup culture is surely catching up in rest of the world. We are just a couple of ex-Microsofties who moved to Chennai, India from Seattle a couple of months ago as we found the former to be more suitable even for product based startups in some factors.
There is an enormous amount of interest here in entrepreneurship these days. For ex. every month we have an informal entrepreneur gathering at a cafe shop and there are hundreds of tech entrepreneurs directly and indirectly become part of these gatherings; otoh even in tech centers like Seattle it would be hard to see more than a dozen guys turning up for these events.
There are plenty of expats returning back to India after their studies and few years of work experience in the US and that is significantly changing the startup culture and attitudes here and resulting in a lot of cross pollination - where ideas of West meets with efficiency of the east.
I had a Nokia phone for years and then a Motorala phone and then a couple of windows mobile phones from HTC and others. But, in none of them I have ever downloaded an app, leave alone having the interest to code up an app. With my iPod touch however (don't want to deal with ATT) I have downloaded dozens of apps and feel good to code on it (though I had to buy my first Mac for this and had a hard time with Objective C's syntax).
I used to work in the windows mobile development team at Microsoft and at that time used to have a dismissive tone about iPhone and said it was just an expensive version of HTC Touch. But, once I started using it and downloading apps, I found the real difference. It is in a whole different league and engineers in other phone companies know that. (I can speak for atleast one of them)
Maybe the "bubble" would burst, maybe not. The author's reasons were not quite convincing. The web 1.0 and 2.0 has billions of sites (compared to some 200K apps) and there are millions of copycats out there. Does that mean the web is going to burst anytime soon? Just like we found Google to help us navigate through billions of pages somebody could write a good search tool which would allow us navigate through all the crappy apps.
We took an initial stab at this and aggregated about 10K videos, and give tools to take notes and tests. Eventually we plan to extensively integrate text contents from Wikipedia, OpenCourseWare etc along with these videos.
There is an enormous amount of interest here in entrepreneurship these days. For ex. every month we have an informal entrepreneur gathering at a cafe shop and there are hundreds of tech entrepreneurs directly and indirectly become part of these gatherings; otoh even in tech centers like Seattle it would be hard to see more than a dozen guys turning up for these events.
There are plenty of expats returning back to India after their studies and few years of work experience in the US and that is significantly changing the startup culture and attitudes here and resulting in a lot of cross pollination - where ideas of West meets with efficiency of the east.