I have known Vinod Khosla for a long time. He is a passionate and a committed man on things, start-ups and companies, and concepts he likes. He simply loved Juniper Networks. He now has resigned from the board – and to me that means one of the two things. Either his love affair with Juniper has ended or I think it is a clear sign that Telecom has become un-investment worthy. I think it is more the latter. He is currently interested in different technologies that bring about change in rural India, and he is concentrating on that quite hard.

bq. “Vinod Khosla has a reputation as a visionary and as a person who is able to identify industry trends well before others,” said Maggie Nielson, vice president for strategic development of Unitus, an organization based in Redmond, Wash., that helps provide capital financing and strategic help to microfinance initiatives. “Having someone with his credibility endorse this relatively unknown industry brings significant attention.

bq. It was heartening, Mr. Khosla said, to see that the entrepreneurial principles of Silicon Valley applied just as well in rural India and Bangladesh. “Granted, they are not as profitable as Google, but they have the same level of social impact.”

Ironically, the other telecom investor of the bubble years, Atiq Raza has gone back to his roots – chips. Light Reading reports that Raza has started Raza Microelectronics Inc. (RMI). The company has been in stealth mode for quite sometime and is said to be building a gigabit ethernet switch on a chip. RMI’s only overt move came in July when it acquired SandCraft Inc., a microprocessor startup funded by RFI.