This blog was written by Jeffrey F. Rayport who is a member of the Brodeur Partners Advisory Board, a noted digital strategist and private equity investor. He was formerly on the faculty of the Harvard Business School.

Recently, I had the privilege of moderating a conference of global entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in Mumbai — an event called Founders Forum India. Founders Forum is a franchise started by two successful UK-based entrepreneurs, Brent Hoberman and Jonnie Goodwin, to stimulate US-style entrepreneurship in the European region, and now around the world. The event brought together some 250 entrepreneurs and investors for a series of panels, round tables, and a business plan competition. It also featured a showcase of hot new Indian start-ups.

What the event made clear — beyond the striking array of talent in the room assembled by our Indian host, Reliance Group’s Rajesh Sawhney — was a stunningly bright future for all things digital in India. Indeed, practically any statistic you might cite about Digital India suggests that something unusual is going on. And the impact will occur in the next 24 to 36 months, based on the following data and projections:

Let’s start with Internet access. Today, India’s population of Internet users is 80 million, which equals a penetration rate of just seven percent (or 17 percent of the urban population). That is about to change. The government is rolling out what it calls its National Broadband Plan, a $4.5 billion initiative to build a country-wide fiber optic network that will connect an additional 160 million Indians by 2014. An Indian investment bank, Avendus, projects 376 million Indian Net users by 2015.

Part of what’s fueling growth in Net penetration is an explosion in mobility. The Indian government sponsored the introduction of 3G services in 2011 with a $30 billion spectrum auction. Morgan Stanley projects that 3G penetration will reach 22 percent by 2015. Government and the private sector have spent something like $55 billion on related infrastructure. Further, we’ll see a roll-out of 4G wireless services across the country in 2012. While there are nearly 800 million mobile subscribers in India, very few use smart phones; most have feature phones that deliver, at best, premium text-based services. As unit economics enable ever cheaper smart phones (the lowest price in the market is now $65), their penetration will rise.

Fueling this explosion is a fact of national culture: Indians love media. No one aware of the nation’s obsession with “ABC” (Astrology, Bollywood, and Cricket) will be surprised to learn that the average Indian consumes 4.5 hours of media and entertainment a day, while 70 percent of the national population spends money on content, both online and off. Time spent online already comes to 40 minutes per capita per day.

Mobility will drive much of the expansion in Internet usage. One of every four Internet users in the country now accesses the Net using a mobile device. A leapfrog effect will mean that three of every four Net users will do so by 2015. Bye-bye to the clunkier and more costly PC.

One result of this expansion is that e-commerce is rapidly taking off. Granted, only 11 percent of Indian online users are transacting online. As in China several years ago, there’s a reluctance to pay for goods using the Web; most of today’s online transactions are in the travel industry (representing 87 percent of a $6.3 billion e-commerce sector, says Avendus). Still, Amazon lookalike Infibeam is growing sales handily. It’s a reflection of what’s happening in the domestic retail space more broadly. Infibeam’s founder projects growth of the retail economy from $400 billion today to $1 trillion by the end of the decade. Digital will inevitably play a starring role in propelling this growth.

At the same time, there is an abundance of local capital ready to deploy to feed new ventures. Consumer demand for innovative digital services, when executed ably, seems unquenchable; and that demand is stimulating capital flows. For this reason, one entrepreneur observed, “More companies [in India] die of indigestion than of starvation.” According to Mergermarket, the value of investment activity rose from $111 million in 2010 to $829 million in 2011, while the number of deals doubled from 33 to 66. This expansion isn’t just domestic. Indian entrepreneurs are feeling bullish about global markets. One publicly traded company, OnMobile, an operator of premium SMS services, now does business in 52 countries around the world.

Growing confidence among Indian entrepreneurs is related to one other market attribute: Indian consumers are extraordinarily demanding. Many at the conference articulated the idea simply. As they say in Manhattan, the Mumbai crowd averred, “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.”

Yes, there are challenges. There are at least 16 languages spoken throughout the country. There’s the question of how to develop robust legal, regulatory, and financial infrastructure (including payment systems). There’s the problem of sound policing of intellectual property rights. There’s an aversion to subscription-based offerings. And, as ever, there’s something else you cannot ignore: executional risk.

But it was hard for me, from a moderator’s perch, not to feel exhilarated by the dramatic upside for Digital India. The subcontinent seems on the cusp of amazing developments, only beginning with broadband Net access, high-speed mobility, and e-commerce. The idea that India — with its scale, its energy, its consumers — could become a digital laboratory and growth engine for the world struck me as both likely and inspiring.

Given that, is it any wonder many who attended the conference regard India’s digital opportunity in the next few years as greater than China’s?

While e-books are growing in popularity, they represent only 8% of all books sold today. Sales will continue to climb as new concepts hit the market like the iPad-based Official Stoker Family Edition of Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula.

• Can’t read a page because it’s too dark? Light a candle, then move it closer to the text.
• A heavy gravestone slab is blocking your path… so… drag it and listen as the stone scrapes and moves away.
• As Stoker describes Lucy being hypnotized, she appears in illustrated form, eyes open. Move your finger across her face and she falls into a trance.
• Press the tip of a transfusion needle and blood flows through the tube.
• Tilt the iPad and a character’s face changes from glorious to macabre.
• Blow leaves off a tombstone so you can read the text beneath.

Snow falling across the page…Touch an envelope and out comes a handwritten letter…Press a (blood) red word and it launches you to a just-received telegram…Rats scramble across the page… Open the window of an insane asylum and peer inside…Unlock a mausoleum’s door with a key…Feed sugar to flies as they buzz across a page.

• The entire 1922 film Nosferatu, based on the 1897 Bram Stoker Dracula
• The entire Orson Welles radio adaptation of Dracula
• The death certificate of Bram Stoker

Finally, and most inexplicable, we have the third story type affecting the media blend: not enough of the real thing. Consider this mere handful among hundreds of underreported stories:

What worked & what didn't with 2011's Super Bowl ads

• What happened to social responsibility? Super Bowl ads were trending this way but we lost it last night. My hopes started rising when Timothy Hutton began talking about Tibet, but the ad speedily deteriorated into a pathetic sales pitch for Groupon. Not aligning purpose-driven brands with authentic social responsibility marketing campaigns is a missed opportunity.
  
• Bloat busts brands - I usually love Coke's Super Bowl ads, but not this year. The medieval-themed animated world was visually mesmerizing but the idea fell apart. The evil dragon can't breathe fire because he guzzled a Coke...the invading army retreats. Too much set-up for a petering payoff. Ditto for Coke's enemies border guard ad - a lengthy build-up to a disappointing ending. Other brands lost their way: Motorola's de-positioning of Apple's iPad tablet was another example.
  
• Jumping the shark - The E*TRADE babies aren't cute anymore - the concept is hackneyed. Cloud computing must be jumping the shark when animated Black Eyed Peas characters are pitching the atmospheric technology concept in salesforce.com ad. Some topics should never go consumer. 

• Simple trumps complicated - the ads that stuck were also short and simple. VW's endearing Darth Vader and Faith Hill's "your rack" ad for Teleflora artfully demonstrated how a tight focus generates the most impact and memorability. 
• Dumbing down can be dumb - we faced an onslaught of sophomoric Doritos and Bud Light spots in the early going. Post-SB measurement is validating how the lowest common denominator doesn't always equal effectiveness.
• Dumbing down cleverly is better - Bud Light's dog-themed "They'll do whatever you want" was clever-dumb, right down to the canine poker game fade-out.
• Long builds can work if the concept is tight - while bloated, convoluted ads (see Coke) can lose the brand, the Detroit-themed "this is what we do" Chrysler commercial featuring Eminem was captivating.

• Connecting TV to the online brand - Go Daddy made the most blatant connection between traditional and new media, driving viewers to its website to see the presumably titillating payoff.  
• Fresh creative will always pop - the CarFax ads were original and felt it. The messaging platform "Service shouldn't be a thing of the past" was brilliantly set up by eager beaver 1950's era service station attendants and home delivery milkmen. Ditto for this brand's "I feel like a..." ad. It was fun to watch because we haven't seen it before. Ditto for GM's Camaro ad featuring voice-overs from TV creatives talking through their ad concept as we saw it unfolding. The schoolteacher ending was cherry-topping.
• Flashback montage winner - who wasn't sucked into the NFL Channel's zippy montage of favorite TV characters brought back to life? 
• Seventies music ruled - from Budweiser's Western gunslinger to BMW's X3, the music often took a retro turn featuring baby boomer classics like Elton's "Tiny Dancer" to Bowie's "Changes." 
  
• Best tease - went to VW's "Beetle" ad. Their only mistake was using Ram Jam's politically incorrect 1977's "Black Betty" as the theme. They could've picked a better-fit song; this will backlash.
  
• Subtlety thy name is not Audi - it's unusual to see a car company select one - and only one - competitor to aggressively and directly de-position. Like its previously themed ads, Audi used nearly all the time from last night's spot emphasizing how Mercedes is no longer relevant. The new Audi 8 makes a quick appearance a few seconds at the end as the shiny relevant machine. Meanwhile, Mercedes relied on Janis Joplin's tune and P. Diddy to assert its hipness - it didn't work. 

As I watched The Office the other night (missing its original cleverness & quirkiness), I wondered: what’s jumping the shark in the world of tech?

But what’s jumping the shark before our eyes? Consider the following candidates - some are unquestionably declining; others remain arguable in their pending sharkiness :

1. Open up - When you’re in an interview and a reporter asks you to tell him/her about yourself, open up a little. Go into the interview having thought about what you are going to say. Who were your earliest influences? What were some formative experiences? What do you do in your free time? How did your history influence your professional life? What was your worst job and why? How did you choose your career? What lessons did you learn along the way?
2. Open door - If a blogger or journalist or investor or analyst comes to your company to talk to you, take them into your office. What you keep around your office – books, photos, mementoes – invite ice-breaking questions and help tell your story. (As a side note, if there’s anything you DON’T want them to see, get it in the bottom drawer before the interview.)
3. Speak real - Don’t use colorless quotes in press releases. If your quote begins with the phrase “We are delighted …” then you’re dishing out pap. Your quotes influence the image of you that people form. Say something you’d actually want to come out of your mouth in a conversation.
4. Share details - Spice up your biography with a few personal details – one or two sentences will do the trick. Also, be specific about your accomplishments. If you’re a technologist, don’t just say “developed Gigabit Ethernet switching solutions at HairNet Communications.” Tell the world that you designed the switching fabric, wrote the embedded code, managed the team, achieved this breakthrough … whatever.
5. Speak simply - Don’t allow your company to sound like its competitors. This is a common trap: companies in the same space using the same buzzword-laden terminology to explain what they do without really saying what they do. Try some plain, blunt English on your website and in your marketing materials. It will set you apart from the competition.

If you’re terminally shy, or it just cuts against your grain to talk about yourself, this exercise isn’t for you. If, however, you’re comfortable talking openly about your background, then you are positioned to create value for your company by using your personal history to attract favorable coverage.