MUMBAI: The number of internet users in India has reached 205 million in 2013 with a 40% YOY growth. This ranks India at the 3rd position, marginally behind US with 207 million users and China which currently has 300 million internet users. Online shopping has become popular in India with a large number of shopping portals and 137 million urban & 68 million rural users.
With increase in mobile internet users it witnessed that more than 50% of urban internet users accessing the internet daily & the demography includes youth, working men, older men & non-working women. Urban centers like Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai and other metros have a huge internet user base. Recently India also breached the 100 million users benchmark of Facebook making it the country which is aggressively taking to social media to connect.
On the back of these amazing achievements of the country in this new age medium of connectivity which made the world flat, Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) organized the first edition of its conference called ‘digitize’ for businesses to explore new avenues in the changing times.
Speaking at the session of the first edition of CII’s ‘digitize’ conference Ninad Karpe, Managing Director & CEO, Aptech, articulated how the evolution of computers and internet has changed beliefs of the generations over the last few decades. The advent of digital media is surely going to change the accessibility barriers in education, healthcare and many other social sectors across the globe. He also added that the present historic moment which India is living on back of the biggest democratic elections sees a huge impact of social media and also highlights how governments apart from the industry sees it as a potential medium to reach the masses.
There are more things digital around us than we can imagine, with increasing connection of machine to machine, human to human and machine to human with this sort of digital integration, whatever our problems we can definitely look at a digital solution for it, said Arvind Sharma, president, Advertising Agencies Association of India and the chief guest at first edition of CII’s ‘digitize’ conference.
The conference also had sessions on big data: Deciphering information for effective decisions and golden age of mobile where eminent speakers from KPMG, Fractal Analytics, Genpact, Digital Quotient and vServ highlighted how in today’s time, companies are seeking more methodologies to synchronize and standardize there data. It also highlighted the growing use of analytics in the Indian businesses to become more customer centric.