We in the West often tend to assume that the rest of the world lags behind us in their use of the Internet - after all "we" invented the PC, the Internet and the Web. An interesting article in the Washington Post called "A peek inside China’s internet giants and their massive scale" clearly shows that this world view is quite wrong when it comes to China at least. Here are a couple of figures from the article to encourage you to read more: Taobao (China's eBay) did $3.05 billion of trade on November 11 - eBay did $3.4 billion of trade in the entire third quarter of 2012. Clearly the scale of China's Internet infrastructure has to match these figures - we should be careful of our assumptions.
According to a new projection by the Boston Consulting Group, half the word's population (3 billion people) will be online by 2016. They predict that the Internet economy of the G-20 nations will nearly double by 2016, reaching $4.2 trillion (up from $2.3 trillion in 2010). Most of this growth will obviously be amongst the BRIC countries, with China alone having 800 million Internet users by 2016 - “about the same number as France, Germany, India, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S. combined.” There is however no discussion of how Silicon Valley will maintain its dominance if the the majority of users are no longer in and of the Western world. Surely innovation must move to service the needs of the majority of users.
