CONNECTIVITY: THE SPRINGBOARD
Whenever and wherever, choice rules.
Dave Evans, Cisco (cisco.com) futurologist — an amazing job title, by the way — has talked about an exponential growth of technology and information, which according to him will lead to an accelerated rate of innovation. He sees it as a technology avalanche – or you could see it as a wave. You either surf it or you get crushed under it. Evans says that nowadays the volume of information doubles every 11 hours, but less than ten years from now it will double every 11 seconds.5 As data storage goes up and costs go down, and more people connect to the net and therefore have the best chance ever to get a good education, innovation will be seen in all areas of life.
Connectivity, then, is the springboard to change, which is bringing much higher participation from more countries, cultures and mentalities as boundaries fall. Connectivity is also about bridging borders, as technology makes information accessible to everyone almost everywhere. For a few years now I have been working with service providers from Argentina, Brazil, Turkey and India. I find they work faster, more cheaply and usually more reliably than European providers do. So why would I not take advantage of that?
But who is actually connected? Who is online? The answer is even more interesting than the question. Tracking global Internet usage I found that 2.4 billion people — around 34,3% of the world population — were online. Of those 44,8% are from Asia, 21,5% from Europe, 11,4% from North America, 10,6% from Latin America, 7% from Africa, 3,7% from the Middle East and 1% from Australia.6 I repeat, among all Internet users only 21,5% are from Europe and only 11,4% from North America.
Of course Asia’s leading position reflects how many people live in that continent, but its high participation favours its ability to innovate, disseminate knowledge and distribute goods and services online. Knowing that the global demand for information and communication technologies is a market worth € 2000 billion7, I am not that surprised to find Europe is not in a top position. With 44,8% of Internet users coming from Asia, a massive work- and sales force has now direct access to the European and American markets. And these are not only cheap and poor-quality imitations. China overtook Japan as the world’s second largest economy in the first quarter of 2010, almost a full decade before most expected this to happen, and is expected to be the largest producer of scientific knowledge by 2020. These are just two examples of change which is having a major impact on companies and ultimately on the individual.
