4.4 Billion People Don’t Have Internet Access. Yes, 4.4 Billion People.

This morning, I was browsing recordings on CornellCast and came across the Cornell Silicon Valley Conference (April 2014) playlist. I was listening to a recording of Mrs. Padmasree Warrior, who is currently Cisco’s CTO, and pointed out that there are only 10 billion devices (not only smartphones but any device with connection capability) connected to the Internet. 10 billion sound big? Not at all. According to Cisco’s research, this indicates that less than 1% of the world is connected. By 2020, projections shows that 50 billion connected devices will be online. One word comes to mind: potential! If that was not mind-boggling enough, this evening I got Benedict Evans’ weekly email (subscribe here, totally worth it!) and as usual clicked on majority of the links. This time around, the article that caught my attention was titled “Why 4.4 Billion People Still Don’t Have Internet Access.” It took me a moment to digest this fact and the word “potential” became even bigger! If you get the chance, read the link below and also check out Project Loon. So much to appreciate and hopefully a bright future ahead.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/10/02/353288711/why-4-4-billion-people-still-dont-have-internet-access