#SMW2014: Google perspective of Africa’s digital trends & insights

#SMW2014 African Digital Trends & Insights by Brett StClair, Country Manager, Google for Work

Quirk hosted a simultaneous live streamed conference “Untapped Markets: Social Media Gateways into Africa” at Social Media Week 2014, co-hosted in London & Johannesburg, to help attendees better understand Africa’s digital potential for marketers and brands.

One of these presentations was by Brett, Google for Work Country Manager, manning the commercial operations for Google Apps, and Googles Cloud Solutions SaaS, PaaS, IaaS.  Over 19 years of experience in the world of Cloud technology and digital media, with a focus on cloud computing, enterprise applications, mobility and digital disruption.

Eric Schmidt (Google Chairman) stated in January 2013, that in terms of Africa

• Despotic leadership is in decline, replace with younger, more democratic leaders
• Majority of population is under 25
• Mobile phones are everywhere, and the internet in Africa will primarily be a mobile one

Africa is on the verge of a digital growth onslaught.
The % of the population now connected is

• 30% South Africans
• 33% Nigerians
• 13% Ghanians
• 26% Kenyans….

per Google’s reckoning.

It’s 3 digital trends they focus on are:

1. Mobile,
2. Access & Relevance
3. Culture

Mobile is self explanatory, in SSA, mobile broadband subscription forecasts (>450MM in 2017), are showing exponential growth, closely linked to connection projections, projected to be over 200MM by 2017.  Nigerian mobile broadband subscriptions will exceed South Africa this year.

Google’s access into Africa is growing, led by the African undersea cables.  Google’s investing in their infrastructure (peering & caching), to ensure it’s ease & accessibility e.g 95% of youtube materials googled, are in local caches after the first download from global sources.  Youtube is the 2nd most popular search engine in SSA.

Stable, high speed internet connections are a reality.

Mobile devices know who you are, where you are, and what you are doing…so you receive insights when you need them.  Information & people are connected.  And information self-organises for faster retrieval.  Google now harnesses a variety of data streams to enable an enhanced “personalised” service to it’s consumers “suggest + assist”

Google is integrating itself into the communities, with google developer groups, student ambassadors, google business groups and the like.

In essence, Google is making in-roads to be a key partner & player in the digital and social media world within Africa.