Investment banking firm Arma Partners has an excellent white paper:
“The Internet is currently in a “Back to the future” phase. Occasionally we have to pinch ourselves to make sure we ´re not reliving a dream from 1999. Today, Internet companies are cropping up again by the thousands; numerous companies are being bought out by high-flyers and bricks-and-mortar companies. Even the VCs are muscling back into the risk game. (…)
This paper looks at:
- the current state of the Internet
- some of the driving forces behind it, including technology, socio-cultural forces and economic changes
- the implications of technology standards, such as RSS/Atom, AJAX and SOAP
- the long-term potential of these technologies on content creation, distribution and aggregation
- the global geographies, which represent dramatically different penetration and adoption rates, income levels and demographics.”