Bangalore

Our trip to Bangalore has been a fascinating experience and really started to provide great insight about the thriving tech community here in India’s version of Silicon Valley. The enthusiasm about Mozilla and its community are also extremely exciting. In addition to the packed schedule I had laid out for the trip, I was also able to squeeze in two more events into the schedule due to high interest level that came from my blog and my profile set up on Orkut. The social networking experiment that I launched about 5 weeks ago in advance of coming to India has really paid off. So, we met with three enthusiasts who have developed some great extensions (more in a later blog post), and then went to Yahoo! with one of the extension developers in order to meet some of his other colleagues who are also huge Mozilla fans.

Across the board, the reception has been terrific. Special thanks to all who have met with us here…the accommodation has been so warm and friendly and we are really honored to hang out here as such welcomed guests.

In this post, I’m hoping just to lay out a piece of what we have learned. I could go on and on with facts, figures, and anecdotes, but this seemed to be some of the bigger, more relevant information about people in India.

Interesting things we have learned about Internet usage

• We have gathered from multiple sources that the number of users on the Internet in India is ranging from a low-end of 35 million to high-end of 70 million.
• Of those users, most are accessing the Internet through work, cyber-cafe, and home usage. Some have told us that roughly 60% of users are accessing through cyber-cafes but that number is beginning to trend downward as costs go down and infrastructure go up. And, most are accessing though a dial-up connection.
• Mobile is huge here, but Internet usage and mobile have not intersected. Most phones are 2 to 2.5 G technology and users buy new phones every 9 months or so, craving the latest in tech. If an individual makes 3000 rupees a month (exchange rate is roughly 40 rupees is U.S.$1), then that person will spend ~5% on mobile service. We’ve been told on a few occasions that as new devices with better and better technology come out, Indian people will buy them. My iPhone has been a big hit for people. Everyone here knows about it, even though it is not expected to come out for another 8 months (or so we have heard). (More comments on the iPhone later…very very temperamental touch screen…what a pain when trying to use it to take notes in meeting, send a text, or MAKE A CALL!!! Come on Apple, it’s a phone, I have to be able to use it to dial a number! Anyone else having problems with the touch screen?)

Languages, languages, and more languages

India recognizes 22 official languages in its constitution, with Hindi being the national language used by the government and English being used for other official purposes. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India) Just observing the interaction of individuals from state to state in their own languages provides terrific insight into the complexity of India. It is not an exaggeration to say that users in the state of Gujurat (Northwest India, borders Pakistan) would not be able to communicate with users in the state of Tamil Nadu (Southeast India, across from Sri Lanka) if not for English, and even that can be a big stretch because only a small percentage speak English. Localization will be critical as the community of users in India grows. Fortunately, we have met many individuals who have committed to helping localize in several of the languages. Here are some more points we have heard along the way:

• Nearly 20% of those attending school are going to an English speaking “medium” school. (Primary is the first schooling experiences starting with kindergarten, medium is the next stage. And 60% of schools are 2 rooms or less.)
• Less than 10% of people in India are actually comfortable speaking English (some figures report only 7%) with roughly 60 million people (population 1.1 billion) able to transact business in English.
• English and PC usage are strongly correlated
• People are craving to read content in their home language. If IT is to make it to the countryside, schools, etc. people will not know English. The local language is what they learn. Localization is critical to take internet to masses. Some say that 80% of people are in “the countryside”
• The government has launched a program to get 100,000 kiosks into the countryside. It is happening…wouldn’t it be nice to have Firefox on those kiosks? Luckily, one person I connected with has been asked to get his technology on the kiosks and is making the introduction to Mozilla if it makes sense. Why wouldn’t it, right?
• Indian people migrating to other countries want content from home. For instance, one Tamil-based content site hosted by the NGO IT Mahiti, gets 120 million hits per month.
• We learned that if localized in other Indian languages, users outside of India would also access due to those who have migrated. Here are some examples:
  • Hindi — India, parts of Nepal, some of Pakistan
  • Bangali — Eastern India, Bangladesh
  • Tamil — Southern India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia
  • Telugu — Central india

Other Facts:
Users pay between U.S.$ 2 and 3 for television a month. TV was popularized by former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi as a way to promote information sharing, so about 60% of households have color television access and cable.

• 35 million households are employed in the organized sector
• 150 million households are self-employed
• 220 million households total
• 40 to 60 percent vote in elections

OK, the point is I could go on and on with stuff we have learned. But, I hope this helps you understand what we have recently learned. It helps us more and more frame our conversations with others we meet. I am writing another post that describes our meetings. Everything has been very grassroots, so if we meet with anyone, it’s likely that they read my blog, saw me on Orkut, or got in touch through some connection and wanted to meet. Because of that, this trip has been so exploratory and grassroots. But, after we leave Bangalore tomorrow, I feel pretty certain that we will start to have a pretty organized group here who will begin to meet pretty regularly. And so, we met with the following people and I have more to say in the next entry:

• HP Labs
• Google/Orkut
• Yahoo! Bangalore
• Community members who have developed extensions
• IIIT-Bangalore (International Indian Institute of Technology in “Electronic City”, a tech area of Banaglore)
• Mahiti — an NGO with an amazingly sharp group of technologists
• Mobilis — NGO running Mozilla on their mobile medical device

Here are some pictures.