Emergic: February 9, 2006 Archives

Emergic: February 9, 2006 Archives
TECH TALK: India Internet and Mobile: Connecting Indians

This backgrounder brings us to the second issue.

What is required to service 300 million mainstream connected Indian consumers with diverse usability requisites & language barriers?

Let us first segment the customer base. I like to look at this from two different viewpoints. The first, who these potential users are, and the second, what devices are being used.

There are five segments in which users (and usage) can be classified: home users, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), large enterprises, educational and rural. Of these, the large enterprise users are most likely to be like their brethren in the developed world � using mostly mid- to high-end desktops (and increasingly, wireless-enabled laptops) to get their work done. The two biggest opportunities in India are with home and SME users. The penetration of computers in both segments is about 10%: about 5 million out of 45 million middle and upper-middle class homes in urban and semi-urban India have computers, and about 1 in 10 of the 50-odd million infoworkers across SMEs have access to computers. There is very large �non-consumption� across both segments....