The World is Mega Uber Bloody Flat

The World is Mega Uber Bloody Flat:

...Friedman way underestimated it.

Not that I didn't already believe I would be blown away by BarCampBangalore, but I had been told the same story time and time again that it was 'cheap and plentiful labor' that was coming out of India, and that the creative engineering efforts were happening in the Western world. Ha.

Believing that will be that ethnocentric idea that leads to the dive of the North American economy. Far from being merely the rooms full of workhorse coding monkeys, performing the mundane tasks, the ideas coming out of BarCampBangalore are better than any I've heard at US camps.

We have Taazza, with their amazing news/meme/context tracker - focused on the Indian subcontinent, they aren't interested in competing for the same markets (*cough*MySpace*cough*) that we're all scrambling to capture. But they could. They've thought of everything that could build context on any news story I'm interested in and honed it down to areas where I'm interested (not just the general public).

Then there is Infinity Music, an online DRM free, totally full of heart and soul music store, run by the brilliant Kaustubh and Sreyash. Chris and I had the pleasure of hanging with these guys (and the lovely Tripti) on Sunday before we left. They are working on more amazing projects like this one.

The key here is to understand that, in the essence of the chunky long tail, there are markets out there that have more potential than we could ever dream of in North America. Untapped. Underrepresented. And unlimited. And, although now we in North America see ourselves as the default and everyone else as the 'other' (I won't go into backing this statement up here, but we certainly can have a conversation about it to come), it won't be long until we realize that we are dead wrong. The western countries represent the smaller piece of the online pie.

It's not just that the conversations I took part in there were the same ones I took part in everywhere else. It's not just that the ideas that are coming out of the India tech community are kickass. It's not just that the innovators there are hungry and passionate to change the world through technology first and foremost. It's not just that they have the advantage of a less inflated standard of living. It's all of that and more.

So, what do we do?

Well, it is really out of our hands (remember, the world does not revolve around us). However, we would be crazy to ignore it, ridiculous to try and stifle it. Personally, I think we could learn a thing or two from what is going on abroad and not be so amerocentric. Geeks around the flat planet are not only our 'resources', they are our partners in the change that is taking place.

[p.s. thanks to Chad Dickerson of Yahoo! for the insipiration for the title...he has a paper coming up in the near future dealing with this same subject, but more in-depth...the working title is "The world is really really really really fucking flat". I totally look forward to it. Chad was there with us at BarCampBangalore and also observed the Yahoo! Hack Day a day before. Chris, Chad and I had lengthy conversations about how amazing the tech scene is in Bangalore]

[tag: barcampbangalore, barcamp, theworldisflat]