Entrepreneurs are constantly challenged to maintain and grow their businesses. It's no longer enough to idle along with the status quo if you plan on being around next month, next quarter or next year, especially if your business depends on the wireless ecosystem.
The World Resources Institute, along with their colleagues at the Global Challenge Network and Harvard's John F. Kennedy school of government, have published an insightful report detailing the global social and economic impact of the Base of the Economic Pyramid, better known as BOP.
The above graph is explained as follows:
Four billion people form the base of the economic pyramid (BOP) --
those with annual incomes below $3,000 (in local purchasing power).
The BOP makes up 72 percent of the 5,575 million people recorded by
available national household surveys worldwide and an overwhelming
majority of the population in the developing countries of Africa, Asia,
Eastern Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean -- home to nearly
all the BOP.
This large segment of humanity faces significant unmet needs and
lives in relative poverty: in current U.S. dollars their incomes are
less than $3.35 a day in Brazil, $2.11 in China, $1.89 in Ghana, and
$1.56 in India.
Yet together they have substantial purchasing power: the BOP constitutes a $5 trillion global consumer market.
Even though the report is not about wireless technology per se, it does help us to understand the indisputable fact that the worlds developing countries will drive major portions of the economic and social landscapes. This fact is certainly uppermost in the minds of many a Fortune 500 companies' CEO's.
Sun Microsystems' CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, shared his views on the importance of BOP in this Next Billion video segment (scroll to the bottom of the correct page).
As BOP users gain access to mobile devices and become more comfortable using them as tools to enhance their social and economic activities, I see a tremendous opportunity for the inclusion and use of numeric domains as a way to more easily access the wireless internet.
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