Math favours India, and I’m a mathematician: Eric Schmidt
Recently, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt was in New Delhi for the Google’s Big Tent Forum. At the forum, he made all the right noises, and talked about broadband, newspaper, mobile ads, Android, Twitter, Facebook and more.
Broadband
He predicts that India will add a significant part of the next 5 billion Internet users, with maths suggesting that it is the country to look out for.
“In the short term it is China, but math favours India. And I’m a mathematician,” Schmidt said when asked by Guardian’s Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger on his choice on India and China.
He said: “(There are) roughly 600 million mobile phone users in India, there are about 130 million Internet users, (but) there are only about 20 million broadband users. So by any definition India is under-penetrated. And in our book… we talk a lot about the importance of the next 5 billion.
“There are only 2 billion people on Internet in the world today. And many of those 5 billion would be coming from India. So imagine a situation 5 to 10 years from now. When there is a billion people on the Internet. Will they be significantly different from the first 100 million users. I’m sure there will be many more languages and they won’t be so English focused.” (Source: The Economic Times)
On India & Mobile
The problems that we have in India can be solved – the education problem is that standards are not strong enough, and not enough schools. But for a person who has nothing, a mobile app is phenomenal. It solves your educational problem that’s the strength of the Internet, highly individual learning. Medicine, in the rural areas, there is poor information. Large under-served banking situation. Here are many startups that are building commerce systems to move money around. Think about corruption, which is a problem in India and many other countries. It is easy to investigate on the Internet. The level of accuracy and precision is phenomenal. There are negatives in loss of privacy and the possible misuse of this information by governments. (Source: Medianama )
Mobility And Mobile Application
Stressing on mobility and mobile application as the future technology, Schmidt said that India must invest in Internet to create another boom here. “Outsourcing created one kind of boom. However, the sad part is Internet penetration is still very low. India must invest in Internet so that it can create another boom. Also, they must use local languages to increase Internet penetration. (Source: Business Today)
Future Of Smartphone
He predicted that the day was not far off when a basic smartphone with a web browser and web-client apps would be available in the market at a price of around $50 (Rs 27,000).
The significance of the availability of a cheaper smartphone at that price is huge in India, where the share of mobile-based internet usage is as high as 25 per cent compared to less than 15 per cent globally. This share can go up manifold if smart phones with web-browsing facility can be made available at around Rs 2,700 a unit. (Source: Business Standard )
