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Tech Perspectives
In Hyderbad, a company called Wipro is training
Indian workers to speak with “Midwestern American and working
class British accents” in order to answer service calls for
companies like Dell Computer Corporation and Oracle. These are
entry level positions that would have once gone (in the American
labor market) to high school graduates. Now, they are being done
by East Indians who, as the chart above points out, make less
money a year than an inner-city black high school student would
make at McDonald’s in six months.
What is even more significant for American
worker is that there are aggressive forces in India preparing its
workforce not just to receive outsourced jobs but to develop their
own version of California’s “Silicon Valley.” One has but to
recall the negative effect that Japanese carmakers, Toyota,
Mitsubishi and Nissan, had on the domestic automobile market to
imagine what might happen to the American high tech companies if
they must face competition from abroad. In less than a decade from
the time Japanese cars entered the American market, their cars
were considered to be a better value than their American
counterparts. HyderBad
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Internet World Stats News
January 25, 2009
[Internet World Stats says internet users number over 1.5
billion]
Note that these are early figures, and that breakdowns by
country are not yet available in this database for end-2008.
More complete data is available for mid-2008 at
Internet users in the world already hit one and a half billion
persons approximately in July of 2008. The current estimates of
Internet users for 2008 year-end (2008Q4) according to our
database, which includes ALL the Internet users universe,
comprises
over 1,573,269,743 persons worldwide. The Internet Penetration
Rate is 23.4%, considering a global population of 6,708,755,756
persons according to the U.S. Census Bureau data.
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm] *
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Chinese Internet Audience
Outranks U.S.
China represented the largest online audience in the world in
December 2008 with 180 million Internet users, representing
nearly 18 percent of the total worldwide Internet audience,
followed by the U.S. (16.2 percent share), Japan (6.0 percent
share), Germany
(3.7 percent share) and the U.K. (3.6 percent share).
[Others in the top 15 countries included France and India, each
with over 3% of the world audience; Russia, Brazil, South Korea,
Canada, and Italy, each with over 2% of the world audience; and
Mexico and the Netherlands, each with 1.2% of the world
audience.]
http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2698
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Africa: Internet Growth Accelerating
AfricaFocus Bulletin
Feb 4, 2009 (090204)
Editor's Note
"Until recently, the experience of the internet in Africa has
been like having to eat a three-course meal by sucking it
through a straw: time-consuming, unreliable and expensive. ..
[but prices are dropping] and cheap international bandwidth is
an essential component for any developing country to remain
competitive in a changing world."—Russell
Southwood, in Global Information Society Watch 2008
Southwood goes on to note that new undersea cables, two of them
due to be completed this year, are predicted to cut
international bandwidth prices for some African countries by as
much as 90%, and that there will be strong pressure for reducing
costs inside
countries as well, as well as for finding new ways to bring
cheaper connections to neglected rural areas.
Although Africa still remains last among world regions in
estimated internet penetration (5.4% of the population as
compared to the world average of 23.4%, according to end-2008
figures from Internet World Stats - see article below), it also
features a growth rate of over 1,000% between 2000 and mid-2008,
with an estimated 19.8% growth rate between end 2007 and end
2008. Internet World Stats now estimates more than 51 million
internet users in Africa, while leading expert Southwood
estimates an even higher user/population rate, if usage at
internet cafes is fully taken into account.
This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains excerpts from two recent
articles on global internet usage, the first from the commercial
firm ComScore (http://www.comscore.com)
and the second from the web site Internet World Stats (http://www.internetworldstats.com),
which also provides more detailed estimates by country. The
Bulletin also contains excerpts from Russell Southwood's article
on Trends in Technology, from the Global Information Society
Watch 2008 report, released in December. Additional articles
from GISW 2008 are available for download at
http://giswatch.org, and a press release on the report is at
http://www.apc.org/en/node/7558
GISW reports on Africa ( Abiodun Jagun ) /
Inernet statistics for individual African countries,
as of mid-2008
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Bandwidth, the petrol of
the new global economy—Put simply, bandwidth is what carries
voice and data from one place to another. Bandwidth is the
petrol of the new global economy; and cheap international
bandwidth is an essential component for any developing country
to remain competitive in a changing world. . . . Used
strategically, bandwidth can create new “think work” industries
like business process outsourcing (BPO) and call centres. For
example, a single company in Ghana, ACS, employs 1,200 people
doing data processing. The Indian Ocean island of Mauritius
employs between 4,000 and 5,000 people in a combination of BPO
and call centres. Over 10,000 people in the South African city
of Cape Town work in these sectors. . . .
Take the example of West
Africa. According to a report by the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD) Sahel and West Africa Club (SWAC),
there are three waves of population movement. Since the
early 1960s, 80 million people have moved to the cities from
rural areas. Populations also move from one country to another
in West Africa, and this represents 90% of inter-regional
migration. Finally, West Africans represent 3% of immigrants
from non-OECD countries living in Europe.
Each of these people needs to be able to communicate with their
family. . . .
Financial remittances flow
all the way down this chain of communication and, according to
the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), in
2006 these were worth USD 10 billion to West African countries.
These remittances exceed the amount of money spent by
international donors. But the cost of sending that money is
around 12% of the total, whereas elsewhere in the world, such as
Latin America, it has fallen to 6%. Cheaper communications and
competition can bring cheaper transaction costs, and more of
this money will arrive in developing countries.
The first wave of the
communications revolution in Africa was the spread of mobile
phones, which are now within reach of 60-70% of the continent’s
population. By contrast, the internet is only accessed by 12-15%
of the population. Until recently, the experience of the
internet in Africa has been like having to eat a three-course
meal by sucking it through a straw: time-consuming, unreliable
and expensive.
While new mobile interfaces
will increasingly allow mobile internet access, the second wave
of the communications revolution will be the spread of
relatively cheap internet use. For developing countries,
particularly in Africa, the internet has been the poor cousin of
much more widely distributed technologies like mobile phones and
radio. However, despite the limitations of speed and cost, a
surprisingly large number of people use it.
Based on national survey
samples from a range of twelve African countries of different
income levels,
between 2-15% of the population use the internet (except in
the two poorest countries) and 1-8% use it on a daily basis
(except for the four poorest countries). On this basis, there
might easily be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of
broadband subscribers depending on the size of country. Literacy
plays a part, but probably not as big a part as price.
GISWatch
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