A village school in China. I’m guessing there aren’t any computers in there.

2012 was a big year for mobile and broadband growth, but especially in the realm of technology, it’s easy to forget that China’s rural areas can lag far, far behind cities when it comes to development. So I was interested to read today that over 2012, China boosted its broadband coverage in villages to 88 percent.

Unfortunately, there are a few caveats. “Villages” here is an official government administrative term, like “county” or “city,” so it doesn’t necessarily mean that most little villages have broadband access. And while coverage did grow over 2012, the growth wasn’t nearly as impressive as you might expect; it’s up just a few percentage points from 84 percent at the beginning of the year.

Most importantly, though, “coverage” does not mean “subscription,” and the fact that broadband is available in villages does not mean anyone is actually paying for it. Having visited numerous villages across several Chinese provinces over the course of my time in China, I can assure you that many village homes didn’t even bathrooms, let alone computers with broadband internet subscriptions. While it’s great that villagers can have access to these services, the vast majority cannot afford them and don’t have the education or training to take full advantage of them. It would be great if in addition to expanding infrastructure in 2013, the government also put some time into training people (especially the older generations) on how computers and the internet can help them, and perhaps establish some low-cost internet cafes in rural areas where there aren’t any currently, so that everyone can enjoy the ever-increasing speed of China’s broadband internet.

(Tongxin Xinxi Bao via Sina Tech)

It’s the same story in lots of other areas. India added 37 million internet users in the past 12 months, but – at 137 million in total – that’s still just 11 percent penetration, three times below the global average. One fundamental reason behind this might be that 69 percent of Indians live in rural areas, and are often totally off the grid. And so, at present, 72 percent of the country’s web users live in urban areas.

All these updated stats for India have been compiled by Singapore social media agency WeAreSocial in its latest infographic report. This is the updated overview for the country:

India’s young web users – 75 percent of its netizens are below the age of 35 – mean that the social media boom is only just starting. That’s great news for Facebook, which saw 14.8 million new users in India in the past six months. India – in the absence of China, which blocks Facebook – could become the biggest Facebook user-base in the world, but for now it’s the third-largest:

Here’s the full infographic report in the form of a slideshow:

[Source: WeAreSocial Singapore]

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

Since we last looked at Cambodia’s web scene late last year, it has seen mobile subscribers nearly double so that there’s now 131 percent mobile penetration. As for 3G, a very encouraging 3.25 million are signed up to the quickest mobile data on offer, which is a pretty solid 16.5 percent of all mobile subscriptions. The number of internet users has leapt up by an even more extraordinary 548 percent, so that there are now 2.47 million connected online. This is likely due to seven new ISPs coming online in 2011 as Cambodia’s infrastructure slowly modernizes.

With 64 percent of the population being under 30 years of age, it’s no surprise that social media are a core online passtime. The Facebook Ad Planner suggests there are 690,520 social media users in Cambodia this month – not an enticingly huge draw for brands doing social marketing (compared to the 8.53 million social users in Vietnam this year), but it’s still a young and receptive audience. It’s surely also a country where Facebook is looking forward to seeing millions of new users. Here’s the full report in slideshow form:

[Source: WeAreSocial blog]

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

The National Business Daily has a long feature story about the effects of one Foxconn plant in Xinzheng, Henan. The plant, which has been in operation for two years, has boosted Henan’s economy to the extent that Foxconn operations now account for 48 percent of the province’s total exports. And Foxconn plants have helped Henan’s international exports grow over the last two years even as the larger trend in the region is flagging international numbers.

But it’s not all about the macroeconomics. The National Business Daily took a look at Mengzhuang township, a collection of villages with about 40,000 total residents that’s about 30 km from the Xinzheng Foxconn plant, and found that Foxconn had had a deep impact on the lives and mental states of Mengzhuang’s denizens, not to mention the local economy.

Mengzhuang is known Xinzheng’s chief provider of jujubes, and in fact is praised in promotional materials as “the first home of China’s jujubes.” The villages there have been growing jujubes for centuries, and one local garden boasts hundreds of trees that are more than 500 years old. People in Mengzhuang grew jujubes; that’s just the way it had always been.

Then, almost exactly two years ago, Foxconn came to town, recruiting and training for their new operations in Henan. One Mengzhuang resident we’ll call Zhang Jian (not his real name) described the company as being like ‘a giant magnet’ that sucked up all the labor force in the area. Foxconn has been recruiting heavily in Mengzhuang since it first arrived in September of 2009, and shows no signs of slowing down.

Of course, nobody was forced to work for Foxconn. Given the choice to follow the path of the traditional farmer or become a factory worker for a modern industrial giant, most folks chose the latter. This has had an adverse effect on the jujubes. “If you go to the jujube fields now, the grass is very long,” said Zhang. This may destroy Mengzhuang’s reputation as the home of China’s best jujubes, but most Foxconn workers aren’t interested in coming back. They can make more — sometimes a lot more — working for Foxconn. And salaries there have just gone up again.

Chang Hong (not his real name) is a young villager from a small village near Mengzhuang. He’s also a Foxconn worker. “Many of my friends worked at Foxconn,” he said of his decision to join the company. “Although the overtime is exhausting, a step forward is a step forward.” For Chang, Foxconn’s salary advantages are compounded by the fact that he doesn’t have to become a migrant to work there. Like other Mengzhuang residents, he can live at home and take the bus. “Foxconn’s biggest impact here is that Mengzhuang farmers simply aren’t willing to farm jujubes anymore,” he said.

And of course, work at Foxconn is steady and unaffected by the weather. When salaries change, it’s because they’re going up. Farming can be a risky prospect; Chang Hong lost nearly 7000 RMB (more than $1000) one year when excess rains ruined the majority of his jujube harvest.

It would be easy to read this as a story about Foxconn coming into a small community and destroying its essence, and indeed, Mengzhuang’s essence as the home of the jujube may be dead. But such a perspective — not uncommon to hear, especially from Western commentators — also romanticizes “traditional” farming. Living year-to-year at the whims of an increasingly vengeful mother nature is not something most Western commentators would be willing to do themselves, and while Mengzhuang residents may be proud of their heritage and sorry to see it go, it’s not at all difficult to see why Mengzhuang’s labor force is now making iPhones rather than growing Ziziphus zizyphus (the jujube).

Mengzhuang may be as good a microcosm as any for the negative and positive effects of industrialization on rural China. There are towns like it all over the nation, and farmers are becoming factory workers with remarkable speed in some areas. This is changing China, and while it may not always be for the better, most of the workers are never looking back.

[National Business Daily via Sina Tech, Image via Sina Tech]

CNNIC says there are more than 388 million mobile internet users recorded in June of this year. That figure has finally exceeded desktop internet users which are slightly over 380 million users.

The report also found that 72.2 percent of internet users use mobile devices to browse the web. In contrast there are lower proportion of internet users using the desktop as their gateway to the internet. Six months ago, the desktop accounted for 73.4 percent of all Chinese internet users. Today, it accounts for 70.7 percent, a drop of 2.7 percent [1].

So why the huge jump in mobile internet users? It’s largely thanks to users in the rural areas of China. CNNIC compares users who are from the city versus the countryside and came into conclusion that people outside of big cities depend on their mobile phones to access the internet. That doesn’t discount desktop in anyway as it is used by 45.7 percent of the rural area citizens. Notebook/laptops are at a miserable 8.7 percent. So it looks like there’s a space for cheap notebooks to penetrate rural regions in China.

Mobile phones accounted for a whopping 60.4 percent of the rural region’s internet usage. Not only are there more internet users in China, the time they spent online is also getting longer. Six months ago, Chinese spent 18.7 hours online. Today, an average user spent 19.9 hours, about 6 percent increase in time spent on the web. Web users vary in age, anywhere from 10 to 60 years old. But the bulk of internet users are aged between 10 to 39 years old. The majority of users are at least high-school educated and are students or freelancers.

The monthly income of Chinese internet users have two outstanding groups. One has an average city salary of about 2000 to 5000 RMB and another is the lower tier of “below 500 RMB” group. Users in town and cities accounted for 72.9 percent of all internet users while villages accounted for 27.1 percent. Again, new internet users are coming from villages and their virgin experience to the web is via their mobile phones.

So how are Chinese users using the internet? You can find a breakdown below. Surprisingly, weibo/microblogging accounts for 50 percent of web activities, which is far more than group buying in China for sure!

So overall, we hope CNNIC statistics are helpful to foreigners who are looking at China for opportunities. If you understand Chinese, I would urge you to check out the entire CNNIC’s report here. But note that there’s obviously a divide in internet user behavior in the China – with white collar people on one side and an emerging group for rural people. I would also urge you to read the story of “W and L” which has been translated by the good folks at Techrice and Tea Leaf Nation to understand the Chinese internet a little better.

The Infographic of the Day series visually expresses important stories from Asia and the world of technology.

Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos are areas that don’t get too much coverage in the tech press – but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t interesting phenomena in the way its web and tech scene are developing.

Vietnam is especially one to watch, with a fledgeling start-up scene empowered by game-development successes that are attracting a lot of investment from Japan.

Across these three countries, mobile is proving especially revolutionary – getting people not just talking, but also online. It’s a situation we’re seeing, too, in India and Indonesia. Following that path, we’re likely to see Cambodia and Laos pick up social media, e-commerce, and gaming almost exclusively on mobile, not on desktop PCs. Vietnam’s infrastructure, though, fares somewhat better.

To read the full analysis, head on over to the We Are Social blog where they also have the slideshow. Here are the three reports in full:

Vietnam

Cambodia

Laos

You might like to check out our previous four articles from this infographic series.

[Source: We Are Social]

The Infographic of the Day series visually expresses important stories from Asia and the world of technology.

India and China are often mentioned in the same breath, as Asia’s powerhouse economies. But on the web, the two countries are developing very differently, with India’s younger demographics – half the nation is under the age of 25 – making the best of poor broadband infrastructure by going online and engaging in social media on their mobiles instead. And that’s great, because the web needn’t be trapped inside a weighty, underpowered old desktop PC.

But while India’s internet landscape is a lot freer than China’s, there are other extant issues, such as terrible broadband infrastructure – which has pushed forward the importance of mobiles – that sees a mere two percent of rural Indians on the internet. Plus, there’s a massive gender imbalance in terms of web access, skewed 70:30 towards males – that’s even more of a problem than in Indonesia, which we looked at last week.

For the full report, hit the We Are Social site to view it as a slideshow. But right now, here are 12 of the hottest infographics plucked out of it for your browsing pleasure…

Mobile Me

With 72 percent of India’s populace living in rural areas, it should be no surprise that this report, compiled of up-to-date information from numerous sources (including from PO), finds that 31 percent of them have never heard of the internet. On the bright side, Indian startups such as SMS GupShup are bringing some in-depth services to people on feature-phones who don’t have web access.

Internet adoption is growing fast, though. Perhaps of more concern going forward is how disproportionately male are India’s netizens:

Social

And, to round off our look at India’s web scene, social media is flourishing amongst India’s younger web users – but the nationwide social networking penetration is just at three percent (see the first image above), compared to 40 percent in China.

Businesspeople, who are likely more able to get online, are jumping about professional social networks – LinkedIn’s (NYSE:LNKD) Indian users are its second-largest user-base in the world. But let’s focus mostly on Facebook:

There are some slides above that provide even greater insights when compared side-by-side with the same survey reports produced on China or on Indonesia.

See the full 45-slide presentation at the source link below.

[Source: We Are Social blog]

Facebook’s VP for mobile, Vaughan Smith, has expressed his great confidence in India, saying that the country will likely rise to be Facebook’s number one user-base in the coming years. He added:

Currently, it is at number three in terms of number of users. Last announced number was 30 million for India and 45 million for Indonesia. I’m sure India will be number one in the coming years.

We recently looked at an infographic detailing all the Facebook-luvin’ nations in Asia and saw that the Asia-Pacific region has 26 percent of the world’s users of the biggest social network. Of course, that too has the potential to surpass the US to be number one.

Focusing on India seems like a wise strategy, as more of India’s huge populace gets online and gets into social networking. Facebook, for its part, has been clued into this for some time already, having launched its ‘Facebook for every phone’ initiative earlier this year, to ensure that its SNS works on over 2,000 kinds of feature phones. That’s especially important in nations – like India and the Philippines – where so many people use cheaper phones and 2G/GPRS – or, indeed, SMS – to post status updates and photos.

Vaughan Smith said of these shifting trends:

We expect that majority of people in India who have phones would use Facebook as the most important thing on their phone, because that’s what we see in other markets. Which means we will have more Facebook users in India than we do in America.

More than twice as many people login to Facebook from mobiles than desktops, globally. Usage is switching and the same is happening in India.

Bringing Facebook to Indian Feature-Phones

Also this week, Facebook announced a partnership with Taiwanese chip-maker MediaTek (TPE:2454) to embed a tiny Facebook app on the company’s MRE mobile platform. That, in turn, will make its way onto upcoming feature-phones to be sold by Indian telcos Spice Mobility (BOM:517214), and Micromax.

In addition, Facebook already has offices in Hyderabad, and has hired a public policy executive for the country, to try ensure it’s making the right moves in India.

[Source: Dawn]

NX28 is a platform to connect farm stock buyers and sellers together in China. The site isn’t too well-designed, but surprisingly it has quite a number of suppliers listing their farm stock for sale.

And for the record, farm stock here means actual farm products such as chickens and fresh tomatoes – not the virtual goods you find on Farmville!

Following a B2B model, the site functions a little like Alibaba.com. Suppliers can post their farm stock on NX28 for free and buyers can call or even QQ (aka IM) the owner for purchase. The site seems to have farm stock listings throughout China, including places like Guangxi, Heilongjiang, Qinghai, and uh… Taiwan, I checked.

Although the site isn’t very good-looking, the little side bar flash map is surprisingly user-friendly when searching for farm stocks in the region.

In an economy which still very much relies on agriculture, NX28 helps to oil the mechanism between farm stock buyers and sellers to make the market more efficient.

NX28.com was founded by Bi Hong Zhen who was inspired to create a platform for farmers to list their stocks online for free, hopefully to create a new Internet age for farm villages.

Some of my relatives in Fuzhou are farmers (rabbits, tomatoes, and carrots specifically) but I don’t recall seeing them having a computer or, needless to say, internet access. Perhaps most farmers actually list their stocks through Internet bars or through a common distributor who would take a cut for helping them sell their stocks.

Nonetheless, NX28.com’s effort is pretty admirable. It’s not the kind of cool start-up that we usually cover. But it surely does help make the Chinese farming society a little more efficient through the use of a simple website.

See also: How a Start-up Fights to Bring Local Language to Mobile Phones in Laos

Last week, Yahoo launched a program named Yahoo Buka Dunia (which literally translates to ‘Open World’) in Indonesia. Using a bus covered with its corporate purple (pictured above), some Yahoo staffers will travel about 5,000km to 20 cities across the islands of Java and Sumatera, visiting 40 schools.

Yahoo will be showing some of the islands’ people how to use the Internet in a positive and safe way. The emphasis is on guiding youth and students, as well as teachers, who are novice Internet users.

The bus will travel for a month, starting in Jakarta, then moving on to Palembang, Jambi, Lampung, Bandung, Semarang, Yogyakarta, and finishing in Surabaya. The distinctive purple bus will not only visit big cities (such as the capital cities of each province), but also small towns and rural areas, spreading new knowledge about the Internet and its potential benefits.

According to a Yahoo Net Index Study last July, the rate of Internet consumption of Indonesian people is ranked second, below TV. The number of Internet users in Indonesia is fairly low, at almost 40 million. But those engaged users are massive social media fans, and are effectively number two in terms of Facebook users world-wide, and possess the ability to create often-meaningless Twitter trending topics. “That’s why it’s very important to look out for the [Internet-based] issues that can influence young minds,” Yahoo Indonesia’s country manager, Pontus Sonnerstedt, said in a statement.

By the way, regular readers might recall that this is not the first time a huge web company has used a bus to out-reach in this way. This past September, we wrote about the Google Internet Bus in India, a program quite similar to this one. Back in April, RIM introduced the Playbook in Indonesia on a bus. It seems that using huge, branded buses to go out to consumers is a new trend in some parts of Asia.

[Source: JagatReview - article in Indonesian]

Internet users: claimed vs active

A new report from the IMRB and IAMAI on the Internet in India concludes that Mumbai is the nation’s top Internet-using city. According to the report, the metropolis has 8.1 million ‘claimed’ users and 6.2 million ‘active’ internet users.

Following Mumbai is Delhi and the NCR with 6.2 and 5.0 million claimed and active users respectively. Surprisingly Bangalore, the nation’s tech capital, is way down the rankings in sixth spot, behind Kolkatta, Chennai, and Hyderabad (see chart, right).

One of the main conclusions of their survey was that towns with less that 200,000 (2 lakh) ‘collectively returned a higher number of internet users than the top four metros put together.’

IAMAI’s president Dr. Subho Ray elaborated on the report:

[T]wo things are absolutely clear from the survey. First, the internet density is very poor in top metros in spite of awareness, education and infrastructure… Secondly, internet is now clearly and firmly a small town phenomenon.

In our opinion this conclusion could lead to misunderstandings about the development of India’s rural internet. It should be pointed out that while the number of Internet users in rural areas are indeed booming, that the quality of the nation’s connections remains among the worst in the world. Akamai’s State of the Internet report asserted that 35 percent of India’s connections are under 256 KBps (see below). Recent figures from Pando Networks rank India at 108th in the world with an average connection speed of 184KBps.

The Indian-made Fly Vision budget tablet - available in white ot black.

While the international market is getting flooded with high-end, high-price tablets, the Indian tech arena is seeing a surge in low-end devices. And of course, the smaller price tag comes at the cost of features. The latest offering in the market is from Fly Mobile, which has launched its Android tablet at US$145, a lot cheaper than even the upcoming Amazon Fire.

The tablet, christened Fly Vision, runs Android; but at a sub-$150 price point, you will have to make do with the outdated Froyo (2.2) version. With its 256MB of RAM, you can’t really expect it to rock Honeycomb (3.x). The tablet comes with a seven-inch LCD touchscreen, which is able to give you a 800 x 480 pixel resolution. Fly Vision packs the low-power 600 MHz Rockchip 2818 processor, which powers many low-end Chinese- and Indian-made slates.

While it has 2GB of SSD storage on board, you can expand that up to 16GB using its micro-SD card slot. The tablet also has a 1.3-megapixel camera and the usual bells and whistles such as a built-in speaker, a 3.5 mm audio jack, and the full range of Google apps. The tablet supports wifi, Bluetooth, and even 3G.

Local tablet makers have been aiming for low prices and a bare minimum feature-set in the Indian market. Barring the ultra low-budget Aakash, which is priced at a subsidized $35 point, this Fly Vision sports the lowest price tag. The other contenders are the Beetel Magiq, which is priced at $199, HCL’s ME X1 tablet at $210, and Reliance’s 3G Tab at $260. Though all these tablets also offer considerably better specs than the Fly Vision.

The speed at which the Indian tech industry is churning out low-price tablets may give the illusion that the segment is thriving in the country. However, most of these companies have refused to provide official sales figures for their products. The freshest figures in this regard come from market research companies. According to CMRI, 85,000 tablets were sold in India in the period between November 2010 and March 2011. While Samsung commanded the sector with 84.7 percent market share and Apple followed with a miniscule 5.9 percent, the remaining 9.4 percent of slate sales was shared among the other tablets. But note that all of the afore-mentioned home-grown tablets were not available at that time.

In the absence of sales figure and other data, it is difficult to gauge the real market performance of these budget tablets. Though, keeping in view their low price tag, we assume that consumers have pretty subdued expectations of them.

[Source: ThinkDigit]

The Beyon I-Tel i786 mobile. Click to enlarge.

India will soon get its first-ever Islamic mobile phone that has been custom-built for Muslim consumers, filled with relevant apps such as a Hijri calendar, and a Qibla direction finder app. It’s a joint venture between a local company, I-Tel India, and a handset maker called Beyon.

To be called the Beyon I-Tel i786 (pictured above), it’ll hit shelves in India on November 12th. It’s a feature-phone – not a smartphone – that’s designed to be cheap and very useful to its target audience. It’ll be priced at US$60, which is about Rs 2952. The mobile supports Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, and English for this market, as well as Arabic, Turkish and others which suggest that its sales will go international eventually. No word on the phone’s OS, but it’ll likely be the kind of tweaked JAVA-based platform that most such feature-phones run.

Pre-installed apps include the afore-mentioned Qibla and Hijri ones, as well as Islamic ringtones and wallpapers, an Halal meat guide, and a few other goodies. Being such a specialist product, I-Tel has taken some careful steps to do this right. I-Tel’s GM, Shan Sharma, tells Penn-Olson that:

The name of the mobile has been approved by leading Islamic scholars of India because [786] is a very auspicious number for Muslims […] And as corporate social responsibility, we are offering 2.5 percent as Zakat – a kind of Islamic tax – for an NGO that helps needy and poor Muslim children get an education.

Of course, India’s increasingly numerous mobile phone users can achieve similar results on their Android, iPhone, or BlackBerry handsets with the downloading of a few, choice Muslim-oriented apps. I’m sure that Nokia has a lot of options in its popular Ovi Store as well.

But those on lower incomes need something a bit more accessible, so this upcoming Beyon I-Tel phone lines up alongside alternatives such as Indonesia’s $15 mobile that was offered during Ramadan, or SIM card-based Islamic content for those who don’t wish to change handsets.

Beep! Beep! Incoming… Google’s Internet bus is driving around different parts of India to educate the population about the Internet. It is currently in Bihar, and soon will visit Patna, Gaya, Bhagalpur, Darbhanga, Bihar Sharif, Arrah, Katihar, Chapra, and Purnia, according to Google India’s blog post.

While many of us have the luxury of enjoying hi-speed Internet in our lives, there are many in India who aren’t so lucky. Thanks to Google’s Internet bus, folks who aren’t blessed with any kind of Internet connection could get a glimpse of how the web can benefit their lives.

Google’s Internet bus project started as early as 2009, and has so far covered over 43,000 kilometers traveling to different parts of India, including Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and many more.

Google India claims that its Internet bus has touched more than 5.6 million people across 120 towns in India. Out of the 5.6 million people, 1.5 million of them have actually gone online for the very first time.

Google’s Internet bus is armed with computers and mobile terminals, and has staff who will explain the most commonly used Internet technologies to their visitors in English and Hindi. Featured technologies include search, email, social networking, and also mobile data services. It is a good initiative worth spreading. So kudos to Google.

Nonetheless, I’m curious if Google will tell the visitors that Facebook is currently the largest social networking site. Unlikely, I think. Surely the company’s own Orkut and Google+ services are being demoed instead.

SMSGyan is an SMS-based search engine which provides on-demand instant information on any mobile phone in India. Developed by the young team at Innoz, SMSGyan (Gyan means “knowledge” in Hindi) had a unique beginning – it started from a college dorm room.

The product has been doing well recently, especially after it partnered with leading Indian teleco Airtel in the form of Airtel SMSGyan. Speaking to Penn Olson, the CEO of Innoz, Mr. Deepak Ravindran, said:

We tied up with Airtel some time back. And guess what, the response to SMSGyan has been tremendous with more than 1.5 million users – that happened in just about a hundred days.

Gaining 1.5 million users in such a short period of time isn’t easy for any mobile service, so it can be said that SMSGyan has had a decent start. The viral growth is owed to Airtel’s vast user base of more than 167 million subscribers, but the product itself still has to be substantial to sustain it. Here’s my analysis of SMSGyan:

How is Airtel SMS Gyan different from Google SMS Search?

SMSGyan is totally SMS-based – you can not only send a search query through SMS, but can receive the answer via SMS as well. A point to be noted here is that the SMS will contain the exact answer to the query. So, if you searched for “Who is the Prime Minister of India?” the reply will contain “Manmohan Singh.” You can query Airtel SMSGyan by messaging your search term to 55444. This can be accessed by Airtel users only – others will have to use the WAP site for now.

Google SMS Search does not have this functionality. With it, you can send an SMS to 9-77-33-00000 to query something, but the SMS response will not have the exact answer, but will have a link which will lead to the search results. To open up the link, you need to have a phone with a WAP connection.

Deepak’s take on the difference is short and crisp. He summarises:

Google SMS is a search engine where you get a link to click on to find the result. SMSGyan is an answer engine, pointing to the exact result in an SMS.

Secondly, SMSGyan gets the better of Google SMS Search for some simple search queries I tried on their demo sites. So, when I queried about the Indian PM through SMSGyan, the answer came out to be correct (see the right-hand screenshot below).

While the same query using Google SMS Search, showed the following piece of text mentioning India’s previous Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee (see the left-hand screenshot below).

A similar thing happened for some other keywords I tried. It seems that Google SMS Search isn’t that effective as its parent web search engine Google, and the company needs to take a hard look at it.

SMSGyan’s search capability, meanwhile, proved effective most of the times I tried – but true feedback can only be provided by the product’s users.

SMSGyan is aimed at the masses – on any handset, no need for internet.

So, giving the direct answer without the need for the internet – no WAP, GPRS, 3G, or anything required – is the key. For this innovation, Deepak has also been hailed as one of the top innovators in India under 35 by Technology Review, a publication of MIT.

One must remember that this service is not free, and costs Re. 1 for each SMS search. You can alternatively subscribe to Airtel SMSGyan for Rs 30 per month. New users can SMS “HELP” to 55444 to know what kind of keywords to send for a better search.

SMSGyan supports picture search and video Search through GPRS as well, which will point you to a weblink to download the picture. Deepak stressed the fact that SMS remains the primary interface of SMSGyan, and the weblink feature is only for those who want to search for multimedia content on their mobile phones.

Deepak and his team at Innoz are having discussions with other major telecoms companies to launch SMSGyan on their platforms – the number being the same for all providers. Backed up by some renowned investors, SMSGyan looks at capitalising on the high penetration rate of mobile phones in India. I’m sure that they’ll be getting many more takers for their product, especially after their runaway success with Airtel.

The smartphone boom (such as what we see with the Blackberry in the country) and availability of low-cost Internet access on mobiles has definitely contributed to this shift. The now-pervasive use of social media and people’s quick adoptation to new ways of buying things through e-commerce have also played a part.

Television, still in almost every home, remains at the top of the media ranking. Nevertheless people are rushing to switch to Internet TVs, such as recent offerings from IniTV and Bakrie Telecom). The Jakarta Globe explains Yahoo’s methodology as follows:

The study’s results were based on interviews with roughly 1,000 male and female Internet users ranging in age from 15 to 50. The annual study focuses on Indonesia’s urban population in places like Jakarta, Bogor, Surabaya, Medan and Makassar.

With 89 percent of people visiting social networking sites (such as the ever-popular Facebook and Twitter) this is the most popular online activity. Also, according to 61 percent of respondents, they regularly visit news websites too.

As for myself, I find my habits are in line with the study’s findings. With the Internet we can access a great range of music and news very quickly. And we can even view events unfold in real-time on Twitter. Even though there are still loyal radio listeners and readers for print newspapers, they really must prepare for the change.

Let us know how you feel about this in the comment section.

Students are using internet in the van. Image courtesy of Kompas.com

The Indonesian government’s efforts to increase Internet penetration throughout the country has been taken to the next level. To provide facilities in remote areas, the government – through the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology – is sending out vans that provide affordable Internet service to the community, according to a report from Kompas. Yes, you read that right. They’re using vans!

This awesome Internet van program is called the District Mobile Internet Service Center (M-PLIK) and it has now begun operation. There are as many as 1907 specially-equipped vans distributed across 32 provinces in Indonesia.

Each mobile computing van is equipped with audio visual devices, a controller computer, a server, and six laptops. Anything more, and it would border on being a Decepticon. The van is also manned by a driver and an IT officer. If you still don’t know what the heck this is, think of this as a sort of mobile Internet cafe. It is also pretty affordable too – anyone can use this facility at a cost of IDR1000 (US$0.11) per hour.

Some of the cars are now operating across Java, including the Cilacap, Sidareja, Kroya and Majenang districts. The cars will serve the community for a good four years, and hopefully by then, the government will have established a solid Internet network in those areas. Until then, these ‘net cars’ are very useful and should prove quite popular.

By providing these mobile internet facilities, I would say it’s a good step forward to introducing the Internet to people in rural areas. With a proper education in computers and Internet, people in rural areas could gain access to more information. It would not be an easy task for the government, though. Providing Internet access and teaching people how to use it are two different stories and challenges. But at least it gives hope for people in rural areas to get more information that can aid their education, which they then need to use properly, thanks to the Internet mobile vans!

According to a report from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), the nation’s mobile subscriber base has jumped to over 840 million* at the end of May. That’s more than 13 million subscribers added since the previous month, representing a 1.61% growth rate. This appears to correlate with recent numbers from Voice & Data that showed an average of 10 million new handsets purchased per month for the 2010-2011 fiscal year.

While the number of urban subscribers still far outweigh those in developing rural areas (554 million to 285 million, respectively), the latter is showing over two percent monthly growth.

As for which companies performed well for the month, Reliance Communications saw the biggest increase in subscriptions with 2.5 million added. Bharti Airtel, which leads the market with over 167 mobile subscribers alone, added 2.45 million, as did Vodafone Essar. See a more complete list of leaders in the chart below.

It’s interesting to compare the user bases of the world’s two ‘mobile superpowers’ India and China. Even with this latest report, India still remains second to China, which saw its own mobile subscribers surpass the 900 million mark in May.

Note: TRAI disclaims that “out of the total 840.28 Million subscribers, 588.13 Million subscribers were active subscribers on the date of Peak VLR (visitor location register) for the month of May 2011.” This figure would exclude users who are switched off or out of covered areas at that time.

Highlights of Telecom Subscription Data as on 31st May, 201

The Internet And Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and IMRB International have provided an insightful research about the internet in rural India. The report showed that the total number of active internet users in rural area is projected to rise by a whopping 98%, from 12.1 million in December 2010 to 24 million by December 2011.

An improved internet awareness in rural areas was credited to the fast growth experienced. Government initiative was also conducted to facilitate internet networks and ‘common service centers’ (or cyber cafes) both of which increased in 2010. Back in October 2010, we reported that India’s rural area would be going through a network facelift which cost US$3.4 billion. While it has only been 6 months, we can safely claim that the initiative has been pretty successful, at least in statistical terms. Most of the internet users in rural areas have had to access internet from common service centers.

41% of the internet users used the internet for entertainment purposes such as watching, downloading and listening to music and videos. While 32% used the internet for email, chat and communication. The rest was made up of business usage and browsing.

With the growth of supporting network technology and popularity of social media, it is likely that internet usage in India will continue to grow. However, India did drop a little in the recent WEF Network Readiness Index. But as far as we can see, witnessing internet adoption picking up where it’s needed most is certainly a promising sign for the country.

Some interesting infographics on India:

• How India uses the Internet [INFOGRAPHIC]
• LinkedIn in Asia: India 9, Australia 2, China 1 [INFOGRAPHIC]
• The Social Media Landscape in India [INFOGRAPHIC]

Photo: The Hindu