ClubInternet has a grand ambition to bring the world’s 4.3 billion unconnected people online

If you have have tried teaching your computer-illiterate parents how to to use a computer, you know what I mean what I say it is incredibly, excruciatingly difficult to explain the concept of the internet to them. How do you tell them that, by clicking on a tiny button on the glowing screen, you suddenly have access to nearly one billion websites instantly? To someone who lived through the era of the Yellow Pages, this is close to impossible to comprehend, let alone master.

A recent report by McKinsey & Company states that more than 60 percent of the world’s population is currently still offline. Hassan Baig pegs this number at 4.3 billion, and bringing them online is by no means an easy task.

Baig, who made it his mission to “connect the unconnected” last February by founding a company called ClubInternet, knows this very well. Just last year, he has been working together with Pakistani startup incubator Plan9 to conduct “a substantial amount of usability testing among the unconnected,” and realized one thing: getting them up to speed on internet services wasn’t simply a matter of putting the tools into their hands.

A video recording that Baig took while letting one of his subjects explore Google clearly illustrates this:

Is Google Usable? from Clubinternet on Vimeo.

Because the subject only has experience with feature phones, Google’s web browser is a whole new world to him – completely foreign. As such, he is unable to find the text box or bring up the onscreen keyboard, functions that we as digital natives take for granted.

“[Their] primary technology experiences have been feature phones, radios, and TVs,” Baig explains. “More and more people are getting their hands on their first ever computing device, like a smartphone. But those smartphones still house an operating system and services which were tested and built for early adopters of technology i.e. you and me.”

“We concluded that onboarding basic Internet services wasn’t going to be ‘plug-n-play’ for people who had never experienced them before,” he continues. Instead, Baig believes that ClubInternet’s flagship product – an internet browser that guides its users on how to sign up for and use basic internet services, such as search engines, social networks, and instant messaging – is the answer.

The browser is currently available in English and Urdu.

Pakistan, with its 162-million-strong unconnected population – making it the world’s fourth largest – is the perfect testing ground for Baig, who hails from there as well. Right now, the first version of ClubInternet’s browser is making the rounds in the Muslim country through pre-installation in 25,000 or so devices that were released by a local telco giant.

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