internet

Students take a computer course at a private school in Cambodia.

A number of fascinating web-related findings came out of a World Bank report, released this week, which ties Internet and mobile phone access in developing countries to economic growth, job creation and good governance. Connectivity in the developing world seems to be better than ever. In developing countries worldwide, there are currently three billion mobile phone users, and the number of Internet users in developing countries increased by 10 times between 2000 and 2007.

In East Asian and Pacific countries, the number of Internet users (15 percent) was slightly above the developing-country average in 2007 (13 percent), but was still below the world average that year (22 percent). The connectivity and access to new information and communications technologies changes the way companies and governments do business, while bringing vital health, financial and other market information to people like never before.

While India is the clear leader in creating information technology-related jobs, China and the Philippines both stand out as benefiting by generating new job opportunities. And within the industry, the Philippines is also notable, because its IT services workforce is made up of 65 percent women, who hold more high-paying jobs than in most other sectors of the economy.

You can take your own look at the statistics compiled on each country, or create your own custom reports, from the IC4D Data & Methodology page.

You can also submit questions now for Christine Zhen-Wei Qiang, World Bank economist and editor of the report, for a live online chat on July 28 at 11 a.m. in Washington, D.C.

Certain online circles have been buzzing about last week's quiet release of the World Bank's new open API, or application programming interface, which gives open access to vast amounts of the Bank's economic data that date back more than 50 years. The news was first announced by the third-party creator of the API, and has been widely discussed on other blogs and Twitter.

The goal of the API is to make it simpler for third-party programmers to create applications that make the World Bank's economic data globally accessible and easy to understand.

I'll leave the specifics of what an API is and how they work to the others, but a quick example is the thousands of games and other iPhone applications (advertised by Apple as "apps") that have been created from its API. Apple couldn't have developed so many apps on its own and instead made it easier for others to create them.

Other than the fact that the API was re-launched, this news won't mean much to non-computer programmers like me ... at least at first. That is, most of us won't be able to see the direct results of the API until programmers and developers start to create mashups, widgets and other applications that make it easy for the rest of us to access, understand and visualize the data.

New and innovative uses of the World Bank's valuable data will hopefully be an eventual result of the API. Irakli Nadareishvili, who was on the team that created the API for the Bank, writes on Phase2's blog, "What you can do with actual code and integration with other tools is probably only limited by imagination."

Despite concerns of the Chinese government about its recently recognized Internet Addiction Disorder, there is little doubt that the web is now part of life for the country's 298 million netizens, as well as an evident piece of the government's communications strategy. One obvious example that we noticed last year is Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's Facebook page, which can now boast about having more than 98,000 supporters.

Following Chinese President Hu Jintao's brief online chat in June, Wen held a live chat of his own last week. Thousands of questions poured in from China (and the rest of the world), according to AFP's news report, which also says Wen was questioned on a range of topics:

"… with some querying the amount he earned, how long he slept a day, and how much alcohol he could drink, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

But Wen chose not to answer those, focusing instead on the more serious issues of the economic crisis, China's healthcare reform and the shoe-throwing incident that took place in Cambridge, Britain, this month."

The China Digital Times has translated to English a lot of text from Wen’s live chat, available here.

Given the opportunity, what would you ask the Chinese premier?

If you are a visual learner like me, or you just happen to like nifty animated maps, a site called SHOW World may be worth spending an afternoon coffee/tea break or two to check out. Similar to the popular WorldMapper collection, this site displays a lot of data from a number of sources (including, apparently, the World Bank) in map form. On an Excel spreadsheet, the information would just look like numbers or a boring old graph. But this site, as SHOW World puts it, offers "a new way to look at the world by resizing countries on the map according to a series of global issues."

The site appears to be adding new datasets to compare, but as it stands you can compare countries on everything from urban populations and CO2 emissions to even Internet usage.

The embedded map below enlarges countries with higher gross domestic product, shrinking those with smaller GDP. Click the center of the map to resize it (or check it out here).

(hat tip information aesthetics)

GDLN Indonesia covers more than 220 public and private universities across the archipelago, opening up opportunities to share knowledge both within Indonesia and with other countries.

Earlier this month in Jakarta I participated in the inauguration of the expanded Global Development Learning Network (GDLN) Indonesia.  GDLN, for those who may not be familiar with the network, is a World Bank initiated partnership dedicated to the use of information and communications technology to facilitate learning and knowledge sharing for people working in the development field.  Its programs include formal courses as well as multi-country dialogues and virtual conferences, delivered via a blend of videoconference, web, and other modes of distance learning. 

The Asia- Pacific internet audience grew last year 14 percent to 319 million visitors by April 2008, according to a recent report by one of the leading companies in measuring the digital world.

While the strongest proportional growth occurred in India with a 27 percent surge, that equals 28 million more internet users. China, following with a 14 percent growth, added however a total of 102 million users.

Also interesting is the forecast by comScore, the company behind the report, which predicts that in less than two more years, Asia Pacific will take up 42 percent of the regional distribution of worldwide online population, with North America behind carrying 20 percent.

There are other findings available in a presentation and video posted at the comScore site (see “State of the Global Internet – With a Focus on Asia” in this page).