Who's going to nuggets the information gap in mobile internet age?

We discuss the battle between micro-letters and operators in Tiger sniffing, analyzing how the Internet replaces traditional industries, fearing that Google Glass will enslave humans. We talk about business, technology, and information related topics. But for most people, everything we say has nothing to do with them, and the impact on them can be almost negligible.

In the world has entered the computer age, the internet age, the WEB2.0 era and the post-Web era, the mobile internet era, human life by digital information, social networks, E-commerce, smart devices, mobile Internet, IoT and large data and other radical changes. But the information poor remain in the prehistoric age of information, and the information revolution's dividend does not benefit them. These include farmers in remote areas, migrant workers who build cities, handicapped people with disabilities, and even elderly people at home.

In particular, when urban residents use smart devices every day to try to solve the problem of information overload, watching CCTV through television to understand the world is still part of the mainstream of information access to the countryside; in the struggle for young people to use Jingdong or Xun online shopping faster, farmers still can only go to old shops to buy necessities When teenagers shake a stranger around with a micro-letter, the social activities of the elderly are limited by age, culture, language and mobility. These phenomena divide human beings into two groups: information-rich and information-poor. Between them, the internet community called the "information gap" or "digital divide".

At this year's Chengdu Wealth Forum, speaking to his dream, Mesvan, Vice editor-in-chief of Fortune magazine, said, "The specialty I chose when I was in college was information management, and from that day on, I had a dream that there was a vision to ' get people the most equal and easy access to information, It's not very easy to find what you're asking for. There are a few people in the scientific and technological community who have such dreams. Google's mission is to strengthen the flow of information to make people around the world easy access to information, while Facebook Zuckerberg is committed to strengthening people's connections, and before long before the Bill Gates hope that every desktop in the world have a computer. These idealists want technology to change the world and to shape an information world in which everyone is equal.

Dreams are dreams after all. At the same time as the informatization accelerates the change of the world, the problem of information gap is also changing profoundly.

1. The more advanced science and technology, the more obvious the gap

In the city, the network infrastructure is ushering in the fiber to the user, the 3G popularity, the 4G arrival and the WiFi popularization, the hardware equipment including the smartphone, the tablet computer, the wearable equipment and the intelligent home is vying for the people's debris time, the Internet product extensively covers human life, shopping, entertainment, social intercourse Reading and so on all life. People with access to information will further strengthen information and knowledge.

However, the effect is limited to some people. China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) The latest "China Internet Development Status Statistics report" shows that up to the end of December 2012, China's internet users reached 564 million, the network penetration rate of 42.1%, maintain low speed growth. According to the current annual growth rate of about 4%, China's internet penetration rate will reach 50% in 2015. It is said that there will still be more than half of the Chinese people are not netizens. The half are potential information poor people.

These people, including rural left-behind, part of the city's migrant workers, the elderly, the disabled and so on, they use computers, mobile phone applications such as Weibo, NetEase news clients, such as the probability of getting information is almost 0.

People with information accumulate information at a high speed, while those who lack access to information are still standing still or making only a little progress. China is not only widening the gap between rich and poor, but also the information gap is becoming more obvious.

2. The information gap has evolved into a service gap

People use the Internet to produce, flow, and consume information that is hosted through hyperlinks to Web pages.

Mobile Internet era networking nodes into offline entities, such as individuals, objects, shops and so on, the real world is mapped to the network. As Li said in the wealth forum, the mobile internet age, people's demand is not only to be able to search for information, but also to find services, can be in mobile terminals, mobile phones, tablets, a variety of new terminals, not only to obtain information, but also to complete the task and complete the work.

These services include network shopping, network payment, travel reservation, train ticket booking, offline service Group purchase (O2O), online registration, network administration, mobile office, etc. But because infrastructure such as broadband networks, the lack of access to PCs and smartphones, and the inadequacy of services such as logistics, it is also difficult for information-starved people to access these services.

BEIJING-East network to buy televisions and other inexpensive bulk electrical appliances can not be sent to remote rural areas. Annual Spring Festival 12306 network booking is also a large number of migrant workers can not enjoy the convenience of--12306 site is a wonderful work, but can not ignore it gave people a new way to buy tickets. As for the network recruitment, online registration, e-government, and so on, for the migrant Workers Group, is far beyond the reach.

During the Lushan earthquake, the information gap has exposed the drawbacks of the Internet public Service, which has failed to reach most of the victims. Baidu, Sogou and other Internet companies have launched the tracing function, but a large number of affected groups and their loved ones because away from the Internet, can not use the network tracing service. Finally, the major search engine tracing service did not achieve the expected results.

People who have access to information will enjoy convenient services, which in turn will make access to scarce service resources more accessible and, in other parts of the world, the poor, the poor, the poor and the relatively inefficient. The information gap is evolving into a service gap.

3, the information gap is gradually filled, but a bottomless pit

The information gap is a problem of globalization as old as information science.

In China, the industry, government and enterprises have done a lot of work and achieved some results to bridge the gap.

Fiber-optic households, the ministry has several times to promote. The 2010 issue of "on the promotion of optical fiber broadband Network Construction" request in 2011, the rural user access capacity on average to reach more than 8mb/s, rural user access capacity on average up to 2mb/s above, commercial building users basically realize 100mb/s above access ability. 3 years of broadband network construction investment over 150 billion yuan, new broadband users beyond 50 million. Soon three years will come, but I personally feel the fiber to the household, especially to the countryside, there are still the last kilometer or even a few kilometers of road to go.

The development situation of mobile communication network is relatively good. According to the White paper published by China Mobile, the current wireless communication signal has covered 96% of the villages. Since 2004, China Mobile has been engaged in the national "Village Village Call Project", the cumulative investment of 38.4 billion yuan for more than 100,000 remote rural areas to solve the basic communication problems. China Mobile also provides farmers with diversified rural information services, and the rural credit and communication hotline receives more than 80,000 times per day of agricultural information consultation. Guangdong Huizhou Mobile Even also launched 1258060 Love Hotline, to help 200,000 people with disabilities without barriers to communication.

Objectively speaking, China is in the forefront of the world in Mobile communication network coverage. To emphasize, here is to say the covering from scratch. Foreign operators will assess the economic value of coverage when they do network coverage, while domestic operators, as state-owned enterprises, will have more social responsibility considerations. For example, remote rural areas, Mount Everest, the tri-sand Islands and offshore fisheries will be covered by mobile wireless signals.

In addition to the basic network, the bottleneck of hardware facilities is also eliminated. Electronic devices such as computers, smartphones have relatively low prices, and "home appliances to the countryside" policy, domestic low-end hardware, especially shanzhai goods have made the hardware has the same price conditions as popular as television.

But broadband and networking devices have not achieved the same high penetration rate as television. The reason, in addition to the Government to encourage support, operators and equipment manufacturers to increase investment, but also need to give the corresponding group of "fiber-optic households" and the purchase of computers or smart machine reasons. Currently, Windows, mouse operation is an elusive skill for information poor people. Even if you can quickly grasp, to meet the needs of the software, Web sites, applications and network services are few. Information poor people are neglected users. Few people pay attention to their information needs, and less people to explore their potential information needs.

Where there is a problem, there is a chance. This is the immutable truth. The existing information gap in China is not only a social problem that needs the attention of the industry, but also a huge business opportunity. Especially after the advent of the mobile internet era, with the development of wireless communication, smart phone, Smart TV, multimedia technology, the information gap problem has been an unprecedented opportunity to solve, but also to bring many opportunities for entrepreneurs.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)