Inside UP : China

iCafés in China

jamesu — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 03:01:08 GMT

I spent the last week in China learning more about Internet Cafés (or iCafés) , which are becoming a key area of focus for the Unlimited Potential Group. This is part of our “shared access”strategy, where we are developing solutions for computers that are shared by a large number of people throughout the course of a day.

In emerging market countries, iCafés are a big deal. According to a recent report published by Euromonitor, 300 million people in emerging markets will be regularly using iCafés by 2010. That’s 5% of the world’s total population. In India and China, iCafés account for up to 40% of all Internet traffic.

And compared to the rest of the world, iCafés in China are huge, averaging over 100 PCs per facility. Some iCafés in Beijing can have as many as 350 PCs and are tricked out with fancy leather chairs and cordoned off “VIP zones” with large monitors and extra network bandwidth.

So I was pretty excited when I wandered into my first Chinese Internet café last Tuesday, located on the first floor of an office building right next to an electronics mall. It was a dark, low-ceilinged room with row after row of young men hunched over in front of flat panel monitors.

And what were they all doing there?

Playing World of Warcraft. Shooting at things. Winning at Mahjong. Some were watching movies. A few were surfing the web. But most were playing games. With great intensity. Many of the gamers were there with groups of friends and were playing together.

There is an interesting ecosystem that has built up over the last few years to support them. iCafé PCs in China have sophisticated game launcher software with up to 500 titles and are supported by a web service infrastructure that includes a Windows Update-like service to ensure that the games have the latest patches and bug fixes. Usage is closely monitored by the government, and your ID card is recorded before you can begin an iCafé session.

100 million people in China use iCafés on a regular basis. So this raises an interesting question for us: why on earth is the Unlimited Potential Group interested in this space, and how could any of our work here help us advance in our mission for enabling social and economic opportunity for people underserved by technology? Do we create a better gaming experience for the kids who hang out in Internet cafes? Build some better World of Warcraft add-on module tracking software?

In other words, by focusing on iCafés, are we really being true to our mission?

At first glance, the answer is obviously no. We are not going into the social and economic opportunity gaming business. But PCs are amazing tools that can be used for a lot more than just watching movies or gunning down imaginary dragons. They can be used for things like skills training and education. And that is where our strategy becomes interesting.

The government in China is really worried about unemployment right now. As my Microsoft colleague in China Nigel Burton likes to point out, the largest migration in the history of the world has occurred in China over the last 20 years, where 400 million people have moved from the countryside into cities (mostly in the eastern part of the country) to work primarily in manufacturing and construction. And as the global recession continues to prolong, more and more Chinese workers in manufacturing are losing their jobs.

So the government in China sees iCafés as a potential asset to help assist in the retraining of their workforce and are turning to companies like Microsoft for software and training programs to help with this effort. We have an iCafé eLearning pilot underway in one province in China right now, and are looking at ways to expand it to support more people.

But there are challenges we face in helping turn iCafés into a productive tool for society. Culturally, they are not viewed as friendly places where, for example, parents would want their daughters to go to learn how to use spreadsheets or other business software. We also need to create incentives for iCafé owners to support this training scenario. But our early experience from the pilot in China and from pilots in other parts of the world indicates that this idea of using iCafés as a workforce development tool has merit, and we are looking forward seeing how we can expand this idea more broadly.

Recent Recap (Rural)

jamesu — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 02:32:25 GMT

I was out of the office over the last 5 weeks, and during that time we had a lot going on in the Unlimited Potential Group, especially around some of our efforts involving rural computing.

For starters, we have posted a video and have engaged in a public discussion around Digital Green, an agriculture extension project in India that is being managed by the Microsoft Research Emerging Markets team there. The idea behind the project is to use "low tech" digital videos and TVs to help train small and marginal farmers on how to improve the way they farm. The project also uses elements of a participatory social network to get over many of the trust and cultural issues that can plague these type of training and aid programs. I was able to meet our team working on the project during some executive reviews here in April, and it is pretty cool to see the type of impact they are starting to have. This is a great example of creative capitalism. You can see a short video of their work here.

Secondly, Microsoft held the Imagine Cup finals in Paris two weeks ago and announced that the team from Indonesia won the Rural Innovation Award. Among other things, the winning team gets the opportunity now to work as interns in the lab doing Digital Green! Their winning project, called Butterfly, is an environmental reporting system that streamlines how citizens can report environmental issues to government agencies and then track how public officials respond. I love this project for multiple reasons: it deals with environmental sustainability, it is a "phone first" application that combines SMS with a web based portal along with BI and social networking, and it was designed by college kids who are applying their passion for technology to solve a critical social issue.

Finally, as I mentioned last month, we had a team of people from Unlimited Potential participate in a public outreach project in Western China with the goal of raising awareness around digital divide issues that affect people living in rural areas in that part of the world. The team donated technology to schools, met with local officials, and participated in a week-long "Gobi March" endurance race across the desert. Well, I am happy to report that everyone survived the race and made it home safe and sound. Their trip was covered by Chinese national television, ABC News, and the Seattle local Fox affiliate.

So it was a busy month while I was gone, and it was nice to see these hands-on projects getting the level of attention they deserve.

Western China Project

jamesu — Sat, 31 May 2008 00:47:16 GMT

A group of people from Microsoft's Unlimited Potential team are heading out to Western China next week to raise awareness on a firsthand basis around issues involving the digital divide for rural communities in emerging market countries. You can learn more about the project on the UP home page. The team will be evangelizing existing UP programs targeting rural access like Telecenters and Infowagons. They will even be participating in a "Gobi March" endurance race across the desert.

From my perspective this is an interesting project because it involves direct interaction between people from Microsoft's corporate headquarters with people living in the types of rural villages that our programs and technology efforts are trying to serve. One of the goals of this blog and the UP web site is to "Tell the Story" around what Microsoft and other groups are doing in this space. Too often we wind up writing about announcements Microsoft execs (myself included) make at various conferences around the world. Now don't get me wrong, these conferences are important because they are often used by government and NGO leaders to exchange ideas around best practices and new programs they can use.

But there is something refreshing about actually "getting out there" and reporting on the kind of impact we can make. The UP team plans to do a lot more of this web based reporting over the next year. So I wish the team well and can't wait to see how this project turns out.