Friday, November 06, 2009

Murthys and Infy

A pleasant story about love, freedom, entrepreneurship and human values. A must-read article.

Numbers, figures and all that...

Facts got hold of me quite firmly this week when I decided to google curiously some of my unanswered questions. Here is what it looks like:

1) India with the population of 1.2 billion people has only 47 million total internet users. Read the last line carefully, the number belongs to total internet users and not the active ones. The number of active users would be even lesser. Out of 47 million, 39 mill come from urban areas and the remaining 8 mill come from rural areas.

2) The projected yearly growth for total internet users is about 10%, i.e. one will see growth of about 5 - 6 mill users for few years, which is a pretty disappointing figure.

3) Another interesting yet somewhat discomforting fact is that only 13% of the total internet users prefer to read online content in English. Other popular languages are Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Gujurati.

So if you are a tech entrepreneur in India banking on online ads for the business model then these figures will serve a good reality check for your business.