September 15, 2008 | Monday

Google - Charity doesn’t start at home

By Robert Weatherhead – Digital Media Manager in Marketing |News |Search Engines |Google

Google has announced an investment in 03b networks, an organisation whose goal it is to get high speed internet connectivity to developing nations at low-cost. They aim to counter the lack of fibre optic cables and political and economic barriers to laying them by introducing a network of medium orbit satellites. These satellites will allow for wide coverage whilst orbiting low enough to negate the speed issues associated with other geo-synchonous satellites.

But what is in this for Google apart from a nice warm fuzzy feeling of helping the underprivileged? Put simply, without the Internet, Google cannot make any money and the potential of these big emerging markets is huge. If we take the example of the G20 developing nations, which accounts for 60% of the world population, we can quantify the exact scale of this opportunity.

By simply increasing the penetration of those coutries which fall below the world average of 21.9% to this level the user’s increase by 293,023,155!

Imagine all these people accessing the internet and landing on a Google homepage (you’ve got to think that’s part of the deal!) and using Google Chrome to browse the web. That’s a hell of a user base for Google to go after and should be the main area of significant internet growth in the next 10 years if done correctly.