BANGALORE, INDIA — It’s almost as if Russian cell phone carrier MTS has bought the naming rights to Bangalore. I half expected my immigration stamp to read “BANGALORE! ™ BROUGHT TO YOU BY MTS.” The carrier recently launched service in the uber-competitive Indian telecom market and has erected billboards every twenty feet or so. I have never seen so much advertising by one company in one space. They all sport an agro looking dude with his face twisted in some rebel-yell while he does inscrutable things with robots and mechanical arms holding different tech gadgets.

Why have these ads made such an impression on me? Because I’ve spent a week sitting in stopped Bangalore traffic looking at them. Ironically one keeps boasting: CONGESTION-FREE MOBILE NETWORK. Sitting still and listening to the honking of cars, mopeds, bikes and rickshaws all around me, it’s an easy guess that, if true, MTS could be the only thing congestion-free in India.

Now that India has one of the world’s best mobile infrastructures, it needs a decent road infrastructure. And a smart entrepreneur needs to come up with a modern fix.

DELHI, INDIA–“I’ll take you! I live there!” a small boy with a blue shirt and a perfect toothy grin said as he ran ahead of me. His quiet friend in yellow jogged beside him smiling shyly, his jet-black Elvis curl bobbing on his forehead. The boy in blue stopped a few yards in front of me turned around, beaming and added in Hindi, “I know computers quite well.”

These weren’t middle class kids on the well-trod, parent-driven Indian path to seats at IIT. These were Delhi slum kids, whose families likely live on less than $2 a day. And yet, for the last five years, they’ve spent several hours of their free time every day playing games and learning English, Math and Science on computers.

So how have they bridged the much-agonized-about digital divide without a hand out from a chip company, computer company or wealthy philanthropist? A for-profit Indian company called NIIT.

GURGOAN, INDIA– Back in 1995, Deep Kalra knew that India had burgeoning consumer promise. So he took a risk, quit his safe-but-boring banking job and joined AMF Bowling—an American company that was aiming to bring bowling alleys and billiard halls to India for the first time.

It didn’t quite scratch his entrepreneurial itch and the hobby was ahead of its time for Indians. So after four years, he headed back into the safe world of banking. And then, in 2000, with some money saved up, he decided to leave again and do things his way. Enamored by the Internet and frustrated by how hard it was to travel in India he opened MakeMyTrip.com. The site—as you might guess from the name—was like any of the online travel brokers started during the dot com bubble, only it was in India.

Of course, that was a pretty crucial difference. What Kalra didn’t know back in those dark days was that he was about to benefit from a global Internet truism: Online travel is the ecommerce gateway drug.

Executives from Tudou—one of two companies left fighting it out to be the YouTube of China—were in San Francisco earlier this week to meet with investors and do a little schmoozing.

I met up with CEO Gary Wang and COO Sam Lai, who already raised some $85 million from Granite Global Ventures and General Catalyst Partners, and they swore they weren’t here trying to raise more cash. That’s a bit of a shock. Last we wrote about Tudou and its arch-competitor YouKu, they were burning through hundreds of millions between them trying to find what YouTube still hasn’t: A way for online advertising to pay for video’s outrageous broadband costs.

I’ve met a lot of expats in my time in China. Some decided to move during an Asian studies class in college. Others decided to move when they saw Mandarin-speaking colleagues getting a promotion over them at work. Still others may have promised a Chinese parent on his or her deathbed to return to the homeland.

For Chicago-native Brian Sloan, it was about the time he was being questioned by police for trafficking and dismembering human skulls.

After a decade in Silicon Valley, I’ve learned there’s a difference between what some VCs say and what they do. For instance, there’s the well-worn phrase that nearly every venture firm utters: “We believe downturns are the best time to invest.” And yet, somehow, the investment numbers always go down in recessions.

But University of San Francisco associate professor of entrepreneurship Mark Cannice puts a bit more stock in what VCs say. And to be fair, he’s got some data to prove it. While there are tons of studies that track what VCs did in a quarter, for the last six years Cannice has polled nearly 40 local VCs to ask how confident they feel about the high growth industry in the next six to 18 months. And interestingly, the results almost always presage an upturn or a downturn in exits by a quarter.

USF just released the third quarter numbers and for the first time since Cannice started the survey the measure of confidence was exactly the same as the previous quarter—down to the hundredth decimal place.

Ben Huh is usually holed up in his Seattle-based company Pet Holdings Inc—better known as the company that brings you I Can Has Cheezburger?, the FAIL Blog and nearly thirty other sites that aim to make you laugh for five minutes every day. But he’s down in the Bay Area this week to promote the launch of three new books “How to Take over the World: A LOLCat Guide 2 Winning,” “Graph out Loud,” based on GraphJam and FAIL Nation: A Visual Romp through the World of Epic Fails.” A big party is happening tonight.

Annoyingly, Huh is also running around San Francisco this week doing all kinds of media interviews. But here are some things I pried out of him yesterday that you may not know.

At first blush, it seems like Song Li is one of those stereotypical Chinese Web entrepreneurs. The kind who rips off successful US sites and hopes operating in the world’s largest consumer Internet market will magically create a successful company. After all, he made a good bit of money investing in ChinaHR—a job board site that sold to Monster.com for more than $200 million over two deals — and right now he operates Digu.com, a Twitter-clone, and Zhenai.com an online dating site that could be the Chinese Match.com.

But if you dig a little deeper into that dating site, you start to understand how differently Li thinks, and how that thinking reflects an aspect of Chinese consumer Web sites that Westerners frequently miss. Where Chinese Web entrepreneurs shine is in taking an existing business idea – ripping it off, if you like – but then completely rethinking and reinventing that idea’s business model and process. This not only makes the companies more profitable faster, it’s a big reason why home-grown Chinese versions continually beat US companies trying to expand into China.

BEIJING, CHINA– Give Yan Zhang (left) credit for honesty. You ask most expats about life in China and they talk up building bridges, mixing with the locals and their valuable expertise in building government contacts. When I asked Zhang about his expat life over breakfast he looked at me and said, “You do feel a little guilty about this life, because it can feel inauthentic.”

Inauthentic? Tell me more.

SHENZHEN, CHINA– One of my very early posts for TechCrunch referenced the “futurism” of 1950s Americana, where companies like Monsanto and Disney played out dreamy visions of a new automated way of living that never quite came true. I’m writing this post from Shenzhen, in Southern China—a place whose jaw-droppingly impractical-yet-beautiful architecture and building-size LED-lit billboards make the city look like it could be the set for just that kind of dreamy science fiction megatropolis. (Example? The other nights I had drinks outside the InterContinental’s bar, which is shaped like a huge pirate ship.)

So imagine my expectations when I set out to see BYD’s “Village of the Future.” BYD—for those who don’t know—is a Chinese powerhouse of battery innovation with more than 130,000 employees, roughly 10% of whom work in R&D. The company is a living, breathing reality check to Westerners who think Southern China is merely a hub for assembling the technology U.S. designs. My BYD guide told me that the company gets at least one member of Western media coming through the office a week, many of them shocked that a Chinese company could be so innovative.

BEIJING, CHINA– Kai-Fu Lee may have left his post as president of Google China, but he didn’t go very far. While still president he learned that Google was going to give up some of its space at Beijing’s Tsinghua Science Park.

He called the landlord and told him he’d take as much as he’d give him. And now he’s in the next office on the same floor, hoping a Chinese version of Larry or Sergey walks through his door.

As we reported a few weeks ago, Lee is also taking a few Google China staff members and indirectly some of that Google cash in the form of an investment from YouTube founder Steve Chen, among others.

That elbow room won’t last: Lee’s new venture Innovation Works got 7,000 resumes on his first day of business and has gotten some 40,000 total.

Dogster has never been a Web 2.0 darling. At first glance a social network for pets isn’t the most innovative idea, and its audience is limited to the kinds of wackos who make name tags for their dogs at conferences or create elaborate fictional personalities for their cats.

But with the benefit of hindsight, Dogster has done two things very, very right: It never raised venture funding and never relied on an ad network for revenues. The result is its network of sites– Dogster, Catster and Snuzzy– that focused on maximizing revenues early on instead of aiming for user growth for the sake of user growth. While many other Web 2.0 names are struggling to raise more money to stay in business, Dogster has been profitable since the second quarter of 2007 and is solidly in control of its own destiny. (Full disclosure: Michael Arrington was a very early angel investor. His statement about his investments is here.)

But there’s a problem. Dogster is still a small site and even happy advertisers will only continue to pay so much to reach the same users. So Dogster has solved that by deciding to become in essence the thing that it always argued startups shouldn’t work with: Ad resellers.

Just like Web 2.0 start-ups have been spending much of 2009 trying to figure out how to turn users and community into revenues, so too have the last few years’ crop of Internet celebrities been trying to figure out how to make a business out of those over-used buzz words “their personal brands.”

Think of all the online fame that’s been created in the last few years amid this hype of the Web democratizing celebrity. Now try to name how many of them crossed over to mainstream popularity. Tila Tequila got an MTV show and a record deal. LonelyGirl15 is on ABC Family’s Greek. And…the list dwindles from there. Amanda Congdon’s “talks” with HBO never seemed to materialize. Kudos to Julia Allison for snagging a Wired cover and starting a lifecasting site, Nonsociety, but that Bravo pilot never saw the light of day and even Gawker doesn’t cover her much anymore. (She may consider that a blessing.) The people who get the most press for using social media are still, well, the real celebrities like Oprah and Ashton Kutcher.

It’s enough to make you a cynic that celebrity isn’t really getting democratized at all—it’s just getting fragmented into slivers of micro-fame. And the truth is so far micro-fame doesn’t pay.

I’ve always liked how outspoken Tim Westergren of Pandora is. He’s not one of those all-too-common founders who puffs up his chest and gives rationalizations for why everything is great even as user numbers are sliding or a competitor is stealing momentum. When his company is in trouble—which Pandora was for most of its life—he’ll tell you in excruciating detail, even down to ugly employee lawsuits.

And that’s worked to Pandora’s advantage. Westergren did such a good job of warning the site’s rabid fans that the RIAA may be running it out of business that they once broke fax machines on Capitol Hill with complaints. Westergren gets what a lot of entrepreneurs don’t: It’s about survival, not ego. That’s especially true when you’re an online music company.

Of course, today Pandora is sitting pretty thanks to a hard work and a serendipitous one-two-three punch.

Given my recent rants about Silicon Valley’s ratio of stinginess-to-wealth and the current trend against “changing the world,” it’s not a huge surprise that more blog posts and tweets were coming from Demo or the B-list-celebrity-studded 140-The Twitter Conference than at the Clinton Global Initiative summit that was also held this week in New York.

Techies who did follow the conference likely did so through the tweets and TwitPics of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. After founding one of the biggest successes in Silicon Valley history Omidyar bucked the serial entrepreneur trend and turned to angel investing and do-gooding. At the conference he announced another big move: His philanthropic investment firm, The Omidyar Network, is committing $30 million towards backing high-impact entrepreneurs in emerging markets, specifically Sub-Saharan Africa and India.

It’s an interesting fill-the-gap strategy between mainstream venture capitalists looking to benefit from the emerging world’s booming demographics but frequently stymied by cultural and logistical challenges and micro-loans, which the Omidyar Network has already done a good deal of in these regions.

I did interviews with most of the TechCrunch50 experts backstage and there was a common gripe about the companies launching there: Not enough passion, not enough swinging for the fences, not enough trying to change the world. There were too many people building safe businesses, too many companies just trying to make existing things slightly better, and too many people wanting to be the next Mint.com, not the next Google. Nothing against Mint, but Silicon Valley wasn’t built on $170 million exits.

Here’s the thing I love about Reid Hoffman. There’s no “We-don’t-comment-on-rumors-and-speculation” BS with him. You ask him a question and he gives you an answer.

So you don’t need a bunch of words from me, just go to the jump and watch our final backstage interview of the conference where Hoffman talks about whether LinkedIn will buy Xing and whether it’ll file to go public this year.

Also, Hoffman names the three other tech companies he thinks can price pretty much whenever they want. (And lucky him, he’s an investor in two.)

It’s 5 p.m. and we’re in the homestretch! The experts and the Twitterers seem to be less impressed with the companies this afternoon than the ones this morning. That or we’re all just getting tired after 40-something demos.

So lucky for us that some of the most influential and interesting judges were left for the final panel. I caught up with one of my favorites, Dick Costolo, who most people know as the new COO of Twitter, others know as the former co-founder of Feedburner and far fewers know as a former improv comedian.

Costolo and I talked about why he gave up a plush post-acquisition Chicago life to move to Silicon Valley and run the day-to-day Twitter operations, when it’s a good idea to hire your friends and when it isn’t, Twitter’s magic acquisition number, and why startup M&A is like teenage crushes.

Also, Twitter CEO Evan Williams has been outspoken about not enjoying his time at Google after the Blogger acquisition. Others have cited that as a reason Twitter may not sell to Google in the future. I asked Costolo whether he had the same experience.

Video is on the jump.

Conference organizer, publisher and investor Tim O’Reilly doesn’t mince words. In this video he talks candidly about what he hated at TechCrunch50 today, what he loved and what excites him about the Web right now.

O’Reilly is a consummate thought leader in the Valley so the interview is interesting for anyone. But if you’re planning on actually pitching O’Reilly on anything this is required viewing.

Oh, he also explains what he and the Cookie Monster have in common. Video is on the jump. (Sorry for the abrupt edits. Trying to keep these interviews on the short-side.)

By now TechCrunch50 judges and companies know there’s no safety zone here at the conference, least of all backstage. The smart ones just run, but Google’s Bradley Horowitz is too polite for that. In this behind-the-scenes clip we talk about what exactly this Internet man of mystery does at Google, his thoughts on the cultural difference between Google and Yahoo, and how big companies can still innovate. (I’m still dubious on that one.)

We also talk about Affective Interfaces, a TC50 company that got mixed reviews from the judges this morning, but one of Horowitz’s favorites of the day.

Clip on the jump.

I chatted with Kevin Rose backstage in between TechCrunch50 judging. For those who think he’s still the wacky Diggnation party boy, I want to point out he beat most of the TechCrunch staff to the conference this morning.

This video is longer than most of our behind-the-scenes glimpses, but we covered a lot of territory. Rose tells us the single most important product move Digg has made in the last year, whether his company is worried about the Twitter threat, what’s coming next for Digg, his favorite company that launched today (HINT: CitySourced founders may have a potential angel investor), and whether or not starting Pownce was a mistake.

Video is on the jump.

Per Michael Arrington’s request I ran backstage and shoved a camera in CitySourced’s founders’ faces just after they completed what was one of the more compelling presentations of the day.

Question one: Palm is really paying companies to write apps for the Pre? Yes. How much? All I got despite truly obnoxious questioning was “under $500,000.”

We also talked about the biggest execution risk: Whether or not cities will actually use this data to make citizen’s lives better? Gavin Newsom: I hope you’re paying attention to this.

Video is on the jump. (Sorry for the jumpy camera work. It’s still early here.)

Soft-spoken Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh had some surprisingly harsh criticism for the TC50 companies he saw today: Why aren’t you trying to change the world? I asked him more about that in our backstage sidestage interview during the TC50 cocktail party. “To be fair, is selling shoes changing the world?” I asked. Watch the clip after the jump to hear his answer.

I pressed Hsieh on details about his relationship with Jeff Bezos and Amazon. He can’t really comment because the US Justice Department hasn’t yet ruled on the deal, but he did admit “I’ve always thought Jeff was a lovely man.” So that’s how it works in that soon-to-be corporate family.

The most interesting admission may be his advice for start-ups: Do you really need venture capital?

He calls me out on it in the video below so I might as well admit it: I’ve been a bit hard on Paul Graham and Y Combinator in the past. It’s not that I think he hasn’t been a great mentor to young entrepreneurs– he has. But that’s a lot of equity to give up and to date no Y Combinator company has really hit it huge. Graham says that’s going to change.

“Four or five of our companies could go public,” he says in the interview after the jump and names some names. (He also does the cutest face ever at minute marker 3:28. Jim Carrey meets one of Jason’s puppies?)

This is a longer video, but it’s one of my favorites I shot all day. Stay until the end where he tells start-ups how to market themselves to customers and investors in a downturn.

Getting a meeting with Marc Andreessen isn’t easy so I made sure I cornered him and shoved a camera in his face backstage at TechCrunch50 to ask him about his new life as a VC. It’s been seven weeks and one day, and so far, he says he loves it and it’s fun. Of course, as he notes, seven weeks in there’s no expectation that companies will have exited and it’s not enough time for any of them to fail yet either.

Andreessen also reiterated what Ron Conway said earlier: There’s no dearth of funding for good start-ups in the Valley. More on why he did that Skype deal and what he’d rather hear TC50 companies talk about in their pitches on the clip.