A few months ago, Business Week wrote about the number of Americans who headed East in order to partake in Europe’s web boom. After all, despite Europe’s lead in wireless, the conventional wisdom is that the Old World is about 2 years behind America when it comes to Internet applications.
That is very ironic, because broadband penetration and free wi-fi is far more prevalent than it is in the US.
I think the main reason why the US is ahead, apart from its historical reason and proximity to Silicon Valley, is that Madison Avenue has been funding American web innovation at the expense of other nations. For example, the US gets 16 times Canada’s ad budgets, but its population is only 10 times larger. Add to that the fact that Canada’s broadband penetration is tops in the world per capita, then you get the picture…
Sure, the US has, will and will continue to make a lot of noise, but the lion’s share of the action will come from places like Asia, Europe and South America: the growth will not come from the US, but abroad.
Today Giga Om runs an article on that, penned by one Jerome Archambeaud, a Frenchman whose started and sold two startups and was a part of Skype’s explosive growth, all that, in addition to stints at Walt Disney and Nestle.
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