There are at least two new approaches for offering Internet community, targetted towards the common man. One is the solution thought up by United Village (via Rajiv Dingra). It will offer basic communication tools and open up the Internet for entertainment.
The other approach is that of a Net PC by Novatium (via Rajesh Jain). It is a minimal PC, which reduces local resources and offers Net access and service for storage to someone who typically does not do anything more than surf the Web. With many online storage options coming up, requirement of a high volume hard disk can reduce, especially if you are not dabbling with multimedia files. In doing so, Net PC has drastically brought down the cost of a PC bringing it into the reach of the common man.
Both approaches are innovative, I am sure they make the Internet more accessible. However, this by itself will not bring benefits of the Internet to the society. One of the disadvantages of the rural places is that their problems are hardly voiced. What goes out is heavily filtered or watched by the gatekeepers, making it difficult for an individual to ask for attention from rest of the world. And the Web is the best way to do so today. We need more bloggers, more news and more information coming out from villages. Access to the Web should encourage local newspapers to adopt it. I am sure this will take time, but it is like a chain reaction. And someone has to start it.
March 31st, 2007 at 10:30 am
Good post Abhijit. The following critical success factors would IMO play out in case this is to take off:
-The wide availability of local language OS’s.
-Localized language content for sites that interest the common man. Relevant content would be important to overcome the initial hiccups of adoption and help ‘cross the chasm’ towards mainstream adoption.
-Cheap bandwidth.
-How much can the internet be used to help the local economy ? The more local the solutions the better it would be for adoption.
March 31st, 2007 at 4:15 pm
Thanks Prakash! I agree with you that localization of content will be one of the biggest factors in adoption of Internet as a medium. I guess companies like Yahoo! and Google are trying. But like you said, there needs to be more local effort.
May 5th, 2007 at 9:08 am
[...] to be gearing up for $10 laptops. The HRD ministry wants to make this a reality. There have been some experiments going on to make network and Internet easily [...]