Tag Archives: Russia

Social Technologies and National Contexts

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

(Cross-posted on my fellowship blog - How International Values Shape Communications Technologies)

When you are doing an interdisciplinary study of social technologies across four countries, it is important to focus on the connections between otherwise unrelated factors, and it is useful to develop a framework to look for these connections.

Here’s the framework we have been using for our research on social media in BRIC countries –

The Connection Between Social Technologies and National Contexts

The outer circle is the national context, which comprises of the five interconnected Cs of computing devices, connectivity, culture, content and capabilities. The inner circle is the social media ecosystem itself. Our research, which looks at the connections between the two, has three layers –

Layer 1: The role of the national context in social media adoption
Layer 2: The dynamics of the social media ecosystem
Layer 3: The role of social media in changing the social context

Finally, the national contexts we are looking at are the four BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and United States (as a reference point).

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Breakout Years in Adoption of Communications Technologies in BRIC Countries

Saturday, October 4th, 2008

(Cross-posted on my fellowship blog - How International Values Shape Communications Technologies)

Here’s a brilliant TED presentation by Hans Rosling on how to look differently at development indicators across countries and continents, using Gapminder’s trend visualization tool Trendalyzer –

I spent an hour playing around with Gapmindmer and discovered some interesting trends related to the diffusion of communications technologies in BRIC countries.

In all these charts comparing Brazil, Russia, India, China and United States, the X axis represents the income per person (in fixed PPP$) on a logarithmic scale while the Y axis changes. By pressing the ‘play’ button, you can see how the variable changes for these five countries over years.

Let’s start with the Y axis representing the number of cell phones users on a logarithmic scale. It’s fascinating how each country seems to stay close to the X axis until something happens and it rises vertically. It happens to the USA in 1980, China in 1986, Brazil in 1989, Russia in 1990 and India in 1994. As of now, these five countries have the biggest cell phone user bases across the world1 (China at #1 with 601 million, India at #2 with 305 million, USA at #3 with 260 million, Russia at #4 with 172 million and Brazil at #5 with 135 million).

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BRIC Countries Early Adopters of Cloud Computing? No!

Monday, September 15th, 2008

This riff on how BRIC countries will adopt cloud computing is triggered off by Ben’s post on cloud computing at our official fellowship blog.

JP Morgan analyst Tarry Singh has been speculating (based on search data from Google) that BRIC countries, esp. India, will be early adopters of cloud computing. However, the high interest in cloud computing in India is surely driven by IT vendors and not end users. You can see a similar skew, especially for India, on searches on “social media”, which is again driven by IT vendors instead of end users.

I can imagine IT companies in India being early adopters of cloud computing because of high familiarity and low cost. However, I can’t imagine mainstream businesses or individual users in India (or Brazil/ Russia/ China) adopting cloud computing anytime soon because internet access in these countries is far from ubiquitous. Even the much higher penetration of mobile phones in BRIC countries won’t drive cloud computing because most of these mobile phones still don’t have data access.

So, search volumes apart, cloud computing is still far from the ground realities in BRIC countries.

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A Comparative Analysis of Social Media Usage in BRIC Countries

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008

At my official fellowship blog — How Global Values Shape Communications Technologies — I use data from Wave 3 of the Power of the People Social Media Tracker by Universal McCann (PDF/ Slideshare) to do a comparative analysis of social media usage in BRIC countries.

Here are the top level highlights –

- The total number of active internet users in BRIC countries (101.2m) is higher than the number of active internet users in US (100m).

- Significantly more users from BRIC countries than US engage with social media tools, both in terms of content consumption and content creation.

- Even as percentage of active internet users, social media usage in BRIC countries is much higher than US across content consumption and content creation.

- At the country level, China leads in blogging and podcasting while Brazil is the leader in social networking and online video.

Do join the conversation at the How Global Values Shape Communications Technologies blog.

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Gaming and Entertainment Drive Mobile Internet Usage in BRIC Countries

Monday, August 18th, 2008

According to the recent Mobile Media Marketplace report from the Nielson Company (via Ashish Sinha), gaming and entertainment are the most popular categories amongst mobile internet users in BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) whereas email, weather, news, and search are the top categories for both American and European mobile Internet users.

Mobile Media Marketplace report from the Nielson Company

Jeff Herrmann, vice president of mobile media at Nielsen, suggests that –

In the U.S. and Europe, broad access to media and entertainment has been available for decades through a large fixed distribution infrastructure, and more recently in specialized devices like iPods, to meet consumer’s entertainment needs. Users in the growing Brazil, Russia, India, and China markets haven’t had the benefit of broad-based content distribution thereby limiting their exposure, and are filling the service gap by embracing mobile’s transition into a personal entertainment platform.

Mobile internet penetration in BRIC countries continues to lag US/ EU (10% to 16%). Still, Russia at 11.2% and China at 6.8% are far ahead of Brazil at 2.6% and India at 1.8%.

It’s interesting to note that India is the only country where neither search or news figure in the top 5 usages of mobile web. It’s equally interesting to note that China is the only country where e-mail doesn’t figure in the top five mobile web usage list.

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I’m the Next Yahoo! Fellow in International Values, Communications, Technology, and Global Internet at Georgetown University

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

Quick Summary: I’m totally delighted to announce that I have been selected as the Yahoo! Fellow in International Values, Communications, Technology, and Global Internet for 2008-09 at Georgetown University.

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I’m totally delighted to announce that I have been selected as the Yahoo! Fellow in International Values, Communications, Technology, and Global Internet for 2008-09 at The Institute for the Study of Diplomacy (ISD) associated with The Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service (SFS) at Georgetown University.

The fellowship is funded by the $1 million Yahoo! Fund on International Values, Communications Technology & the Global Internet, which was established at Georgetown University by a gift from Yahoo! Inc. There is only one such position open for each academic year and I’m the second Yahoo! Fellow.

The Yahoo! Fellow is chosen from applicants drawn from the government, corporate, non-profit and academic sectors with interest in BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China). Two graduate students from the Master of Science in Foreign Service (MSFS) program at the SFS are also selected to as Junior Yahoo! Fellows to engage in research associated with the Yahoo! Fellow. Part of the research done by the Yahoo! Fellow is also incorporated into the MSFS program as guest lectures, special seminars, case studies and/ or course modules.

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