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First of all, in terms of investment in Internet-related developments, venture capitalists - once burned - are now very cautious and are investing in areas that actually make business sense.

There is a significant momentum behind the social Internet. A wide range of public investors were very enthusiastic about that.

The internet has become one of the motors of the 21st century economy, allowing all of us to reach a global audience at a click of a mouse and creating hundreds of thousands of businesses and millions of jobs.

The Internet has become an integral part of everyday life precisely because it has been an open-to-all land of opportunity where entrepreneurs, thinkers and innovators are free to try, fail and then try again.

It's a lot easier to gain traction when there is such a great proliferation of Internet access. The velocity at which some of these startups are gaining traction is mind-boggling. Companies like ShoeDazzle, Stella & Dot, Gilt, Groupon - these companies are going from zero to hundreds of millions in revenue in three years.

It's actually not unlike Google at that stage of development. They had an up-and-running site. It wasn't losing very much money, it wasn't making very much money, but it was growing.

The Internet has become a remarkable fount of economic and social innovation largely because it's been an archetypal level playing field, on which even sites with little or no money behind them - blogs, say, or Wikipedia - can become influential.

I don't think a lot of people have been entrepreneurial about venture capital.

Well all the big companies are really panicked by the internet thing and all that, and sales went down, although sales have gone up again in this country a bit and also the big companies, because they're so big, they need big sales really so they're not really interested.