Google India's MD Shares Three Trends that Will Change the Way We Look at Technology There are about 7.6b people and only about half of them are connected to the internet
By Vanita D'souza •
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Technology is not just disrupting industries and economies of the world, but most importantly all our lives. The way we eat, sleep, shop and everything that a normal human like you and us would do is been disrupted because of technology. And it will continue to do so.
But ever wondered why? Well, Google India's Managing Director Rajan Anandan has answers to our questions. During a recent event Mumbai, Anandan, who is also an active angel investor, shares three trends that reveal why technology will continue to infiltrate our lives.
Internet
According to the expert, there are 7.6 billion people in the world of which 3.5billion are connected to the internet and 2.5 billion of them access the internet every single day and spend about three hours a day.
He shares, "When I graduated from Cambridge in early 1990s if I had to imagine building a global business, I had to pretty much open office every single country around the world. If I thought about launching a technology company, in fact, every single of my classmates from MIT launched a tech startup right out of the university and it cost then USD 2-10 million to get on the ground."
Today, this has completely changed, one can launch an internet product or service from any one country and your addressable market is 3.5b internet users. He feels this changes everything about the market, how quickly you can expand, the kind of consumers you can address and this in many ways is the first big important thing to keep in mind as we build technology companies from India.
Internet of Things
Anandan notes that pace of change has been quite incredible and over the last 5-10 years, it has been accelerating across many dimensions.
He shares that there were 20b devices connected to the internet 24 hours by the end of 2017 and explaining the potential uses of these devices he points out, "When you think about these 20b devices and the amount of data and insights it's generating and what that could mean for business. I was so excited to see CarSense, which is a very interesting company. But the market for CarSense is 20b devices and very rapidly growing to 50b devices over the next three years."
Machine Learning
Anandan says machines are slowly but surely are getting smarter than human and shares an example of Google's AlphaGo, a supercomputer.
The game of Go is considered one of the most complex games, which includes tactic and strategy. In 2016, Google challenged one of the finest players of Go Game Lee Sedol and one four out of five games. In 2017, Ke Jie, who at the time was number one Go player in the world, also lost the game to AlphaGo.
"It was one the huge milestones. It showed machine could learn better and faster than humans in one aspect which requires a complex set of thinking. Machine learning is happening even though it's at a very early stage," he added.
He also agrees that machines will take away some human jobs as several roles are bounded to get automated. But actually, according to Anandan what's a lot more interesting is how human can use these machines in significant ways.
