Developing-World Smartphone Users Will Decide Future of Internet, Google Executive Says

The internet's future will be written by smartphone users in the developing world, blogged Caesar Sengupta, vice president of Google’s Next Billion Users Team. “The future of the internet is in the hands of the next billion users -- the latest generation of internet users to come online on smartphones in places like Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and Nigeria,” he said. “As time goes on, the average internet user will be more like these ‘next billion users’ than the first billion who started on PCs.” Sengupta warned that these users have a very different mindset. “The next billion users are already changing the internet in three key ways: a mobile-only mindset, an instinct for ubiquitous computing, and a demand for localized content,” he said.