The two are pumping in $50 million into a joint partnership that will develop content for the various localised versions of Lycos. This includes Singapore, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and India.

The coming of Lycos India is going to mean immense opportunities for local content developers or creators of websites. There is no way that Singapore Telecom or Lycos will work on recreating content from scratch for the Indian portal-cum-search engine. Hence, they will look at partnerships with existing sites or even acquiring them. It will have to be seen whether it will partner with the Indiatimes, Indianexpresses, or Indiaworlds or Thehindus. Or go for partnerships with smaller sites and nurture and grow them.

Whichever way the wind blows, thecoming of Lycos India means good tidings for the Indian internet community.

Satphone cos: Fighting to stay alive

Will satellite telephony ever manage to find its place under the sun? Iridium and ICO have filed for bankruptcy and are fighting to restructure to stay afloat. The others are begging for waivers, and preferential treatments from governments as far as licence fees are concerned.

But the key question is: Does satellite telephony have a future against mobile phones? There was a time when it looked like mobile phones were just a localised service restricted to a specific area. But then they fought back against the anywhere phone promise made by satellite telephony providers by forming interconnect agreement and alliances with other mobile companies to offer a seamless service all over the world. And at rates which were much lower than satphones.

The result: Satellite telephony started looking like a hollow proposition. Yet, certain research firms say there is potential in satellitetelephony. However, on current form, it seems quite unlikely. Even an Agrani will need a miracle to keep itself alive in the long term.

The WWW clutter

The World Wide Web is set to explode. According to various estimates, the boom will be nothing short of outstanding. One estimate from the Computer Industry Almanac says there will be over 71.7 crore Net users by the end of 2005.

Another one from IDC says that the number will touch 50 crore by the year 2003. And Europe will overtake the US by 2003 with 17 crore online surfers (is it because of the promise of free Net access in a continent that charges for local telephone calls?). Currently, Europe has 4.4 crore internetters.The Computer Almanac Study estimates that North America will account for 230 million users then, with Western Europe following up with 202 million.

The Asia-Pacific region will continue to trail but will have shown rapid growth -- more than the other regions -- with a total of 171 million users expected online by 2005.Clearly, internet buffs will be popping champagne corks.

OCLC Research has revealed that there are a phenomenal 3.6 million sites on the World Wide Web. As many as 2.6 million of these are open to public. And going by the 80:20 principle, the largest 25,000 sites account for 50 per cent of the content on the WWW.

OCLC says that the 2.2 million publicly accessible sites together have a mindboggling 300 million individual pages. Porn sites account for 42,000 of the public access sites. Paid sites are limited according to OCLC: Just 400,000 of them ask for money or som prior authorisation. And guess what: The number of pages in an average website has gone up from 114 pages in 1998 to 129 this year. Adding to the World Wide Web clutter, OCLC says, a million sites are under construction.

(The writer is the editor of The Indian Cab&Sat Reporter. Feel free to e-mail with your comments to television@vsnl.com or television@hotmail.com)