Digital signage, which in essence is out-of-home TV, brings media content and advertising to viewers—to their retail stores, taxi cabs, buses, trucks, airports, parks and conference centers. The large LED or plasma screens are familiar to buyers at retail stores like Best Buy. Content streaming on these TVs in stores, sports stadiums or conference halls are going to become a lot more familiar. The content does not have to come from a broadcasting station; it can be drawn from video content sites, the Internet or be user-generated.

Narrowcasting, one of the buzzwords in the industry, suggests that the content and the advertisements can be customized to appeal to the specific audience being served.

Mobile broadband is most valuable when Internet applications can be accessed anywhere. In the current environment, consumers have to instead look for hotspots. WiMAX, by contrast, has no such limitation as it has a range of 3-10 miles in densely populated metropolitan areas. Its many base stations can also route traffic around obstacles, such as buildings, before they hand over data to national networks. Consumers could be watching their favorite TV programs in a park; devices and software from Sling Media allows customers to access video content when they want it. They could be listening to traffic reports while they are driving a car. Alternatively, they could catch up with the latest in baseball from mlb.com.

Increasingly, location based services mean more than a map and driving directions. NavTech (Nasdaq: NVT), for example, has a product, Discover Cities, which correlates location information with places of interest, such as shopping malls, gas stations, restaurants, businesses, parks, etc. Users of mobile phones can receive alerts about the source of the cheapest gas in their vicinity, discount offers when they are passing a mall, turn-by-turn routing directions to the nearest business or news about an event at the nearest theater.

NVT 1-yr chart

The sales figures for fourth quarter of 2006, ending 31st December, revealed an increasing trend towards the growth of the non-automotive market for robotics. According to statistics published by the Robotics Industries Association, a total of 12,765 robots worth $904.2 million were sold in North America in 2006, a decline of 30% in unit sales and 22% in dollar value from 2005. The worldwide sales of North American robotics companies' were 13,791 robots worth $958.4 million, down 29% in units and 22% in revenue. Non-automotive orders accounted for 44% of total orders in 2006, compared with just 30% in 2005.

Similar inefficiencies are palpable in the movie industry as well. Those who are already owners of home theaters crave for an opportunity to simply download a movie. DVD versions of movies from online or local stores are no substitutes—not when many of them are damaged, as is often the case. It is also harder to switch to a better movie when you are using a DVD and are unable to download another one. Above all, the cost of distribution of movies through the Internet is less than 25 cents while the traditional methods incur more than a dollar according to estimates of Level 3.

The opportunity in digital videos is probably much larger than in music. For one, much more user-generated video content is available and it’s not just the one you see on Google's (GOOG) Youtube. Videos of live events, such as sports events available from Major League Baseball (MLB.com), could well be watched in cars, trains or while walking in a park. MLB.com today has 1 million paying subscribers and 6 million unique visitors per day according to statistics quoted by a supplement issued with Level 3’s latest annual report. Portable broadband afforded by WiMAX, with 12 Mbps of bandwidth, will improve the transmission efficiencies to wireless devices.

Very few will remember the real estate bubble in Japan back in 1989 which was followed by a price decline of 70%. The recovery has just taken so long. It is only in the last few years, after the introduction of Real Estate Investment Trusts in 2000, that the real estate sector in Japan has started to recover from the after effects of the crash. The real estate sector is no longer the refuge of the Japanese mafia. Last year was a high watermark in the development of the real estate sector in Japan with a whooping 45% gain in the REIT index over last year beginning 1st March 2006 and ending in 28th February 2007. This was well above the average increase of 22.3% since the formation of REITs.

The country recorded the highest growth rates in 2006 in Europe at 4.5%. Conservative analysts see a lower growth rate of 3.3% in 2007 and occasionally hedge their bets by adding caveats that an upside surprise is possible.

Sweden has not yet exhausted the growth potential that was repressed as long as it was a socialist welfare state. Over the last ten years, since its moment of truth happened in 1994, it went about reforming its welfare state instead of abandoning it. Public services, such as education and health care, are increasingly offered by private contractors while citizens pay for the services with “vouchers” that the state allocates to them. This helped Sweden to recover from its crisis caused by a near bankrupt government.

Paradigm shifts in the Global Pharmaceutical Industry and the disruptive role that the Indian drug industry is playing in its recreation are throwing up new opportunities for bargain hunting. Increasingly, biopharmaceutical companies are the source of innovation and many of them are small or medium sized companies. The average cost of a new biotech drug is estimated to be about a billion dollars each and much of it is accounted for by clinical trials.

American companies are looking to lower costs by outsourcing research and development, clinical trials and manufacturing to cheaper destinations and India fits the bill. Indian companies, in turn, are making a transition from specialization in cheap generics to drug discovery. While Indian companies have the ability to hire high quality scientists, their size precludes them from making the large investments to not only conduct research but also to market new drugs. They rely on American companies to provide financing for research and development, market new products and to take care of regulatory requirements.

The latest growth rate figures for the second quarter growth in the fiscal year 2006-07, released by the Central Statistical Organization, come close to vindicating my forecast; the Indian economy is already growing at the rate of 9.2% not far from the 9.5 reported for China recently.