Internet the game changer of global lifestyle:

Will a different discovery turn tables?

Rohantha Athukorala

There are times in your life you need to just stand still and take stock of life. It was just that for me last week, during the Avurudhu holidays. If I look back at what has changed my life significantly in the years gone by, the most whirlwind revolution that had happened was way back in 1991 when Tim Berners Lee decided to turn the Internet into a publishing medium. Even though most of us were in school at that time, little did we know that this was going to unleash a new lifestyle in the world with the concept of the World Wide Web. What was unique about this innovation was that he mandated that usage to be free so that anyone can use it. This was the day that consumers life really changed around the world in my view.

This innovation has made a housewife of today doing her usual monthly utility bill payments not having to go through the hassle of getting into a vehicle, find parking, walking down a road towards the telecom centre in a busy town. All she has to do now is to log on to her pc during the lunch break and pay all her utility bills online within a few minutes right at her own office. She can even order her weekly groceryhopping and make a reservation for a dinner with her family at the press of a button. This has led to a better quality of life given that she has more time for her family and has sure made life more comfortable thanks to the WWW.

Now 60 billion pages

Today the www has grown exponentially with many IT platforms like Facebook, eBay, google or Utube to name a few been developed with almost two million users of the internet in Sri Lanka and almost a million only on facebook which gives us an indication of the diffusion of this innovation.

But the real size of the internet is not known by many. At a recent global conference that I attended, the head of R&D of yahoo estimated the size of the World Wide Web at 60 billion pages but the size of the 'depth' of the web (the area where the web pages are assembled on the fly and served up in response to clicked) is estimated to be between 400-750 times greater than the part indexed by search engines. I suppose by the time you read this article there will be another thousand pages added to www.

Way of life

Hence by any standard the web represents a colossal change in our information environment and the pattern of our life. The strange thing is that it has come to reality in just a matter of 20 years. Actually, most of it happened in less than that, because the web only went mainstream only in 1993. To be honest in the early days one could not envisage the long term implications of this innovation. The strange thing is how casually we have got used to it and how we take it for granted today. We buy books from Amazon, airline tickets from Sri Lankan airline and browse Air Asia website for lower air fares whilst we tell thousands of friends how we feel on facebook. In fact it has become the most natural thing in world now and without our knowledge our life has sure changed. But the bigger question is, will it change again with some revolutionary innovation like the WWW. I guess time will reveal but in my view there is potential that the mobile phone can fit this template given that 16.3 million people own one.

World changed?

Last November when I met eBay President John Danahoe at a CEO summit in New York, I mentioned to him that one can buy anything except body parts on eBay and he laughed. Later on at the break out session I shared how children seeking pictures for school projects search them on GoogleImages and download them without concern for interlectual property rights and all this convenience is taken for granted without us noting that how much life has changed due to the WWW.

To get a handle of the scale of what has happened, think back 20 years ago. Amazon was just a large river in South America to many of us, now it is one of the most sought after book stores, Ryan Airlines is the top of the mind budget airline that flies to places nobody had ever heard of, eBay was a typo but now the best place for acquisitions. Yahoo was a term from Gulliver'Travels but now, one of the most sought after website in the world that has been visited by billions of consumers around the world. Life sure has changed without our knowledge, which is the scary part of the change. Let me take a few key websites that has driven the change of lifestyle of a global consumer and how much it has influenced our behaviour.

Twitter

Twitter is top of mind because of the saga of Sachi Tharoor and Lalith Modi that unfolded at the last IPL. Both lost their job on the Kochi franchise issue. In fact when I met the Twitter CEO Dick Castello at a conference last year I mentioned this incident and he could not believe the impact that Twitter had had in our lives in this part of the world. Which explains how much this innovation have changed consumer behaviour. The concept was originally created by Jack Dorsey way back in 2007 and since then, it has grown to be an Internet phenomenon often featured on key news channels as a modern fad. It has now become the best way to keep family, friends, and co-workers up-to-date with changes that are happening around the world. All that an individual has to do is to use an instant messenger service, the web, or with mobile text to do this task. The message sent out by Twitter users have to be limited to 140 characters which is just enough for a quick update. Twitter can also be linked to other social networks, blogs, and websites which makes it unique and marketable as a strong method of communication in todays business world.

Google

This was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998 and today, it commands one of the largest internet search engines in the world. It is the fastest-growing company in history and its founders are worth almost $20 billion each. There are over a billion search requests per day that really demonstrates how a consumer lifestyle has changed with the launch of the internet. The search method devised by Larry Page and Sergey Brin was instrumental to Google's success. In my view rather than ranking results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page, their system measured the frequency with which a website was referenced by other sites. Another key factor was the site's stripped-down design, which made it speedier and more accessible than its competitors. If you want to see how powerful this internet platform is just type your name on this search engine and you will see all the news articles where your name has been featured around globally.

eBay

ebay is the premier auction site founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995.The number of users exceeds 200 million. It has been reported that people spend more time on eBay than any other internet site. There are more than 20 million users in the UK alone. eBay is far from just a second-hand stall. New items are sold daily by global companies; many people have abandoned their jobs to work for eBay full time which again explains the changing lifestyle of a consumer and the opportunity that the internet provides for employment. Danahue who runs this business today is now working with department store owners so that a consumer of today can visit a virtual reality store be it Macy's or M&S and can have access to their special offers without physically stepping into the store. This is real change of behaviour to my mind.

Facebook

Facebook is one of the most favourite social networking websites which is styled to connect friends, family, and business associates together. It is the largest of the networking sites, with the runner up being MySpace. It began as a college networking website and has expanded to include anyone and everyone and today have almost a 500 million active users and half of them connect daily. The average number of friends per member is at 130 as at now. Facebook was founded by 2004 by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg. One of the most un-assuming personalities that I have met. He had originally called it thefacebook. It gained momentum and expanded beyond Harvard into other Ivy League schools. With the phenomenon growing in popularity, Zuckerberg enlisted two other students, Duston Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, to assist. Within months, thefacebook became a nationwide college networking website.

Zuckerberg and Moskovitz then left Harvard to run thefacebook full time shortly after. I asked Mark where he likes to see his company in ten years time and his response was I do not know. It all depends where your's and my son and daughters goes. Facebook will just follow where the consumer will go. Which was a very strong statement on how consumer oriented the organization is. In fact latest research reveal that almost 13 percent of travellers around the world select their travel destination after the many updates they get from friends via facebook.

YouTube

Sri Lanka started taking YouTube seriously in 2009.

It gave us a view of the power of this medium as communication medium.

Founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim it boasts of 200 million clips that are being watched everyday.

Through the grass root power of the internet and good word of mouth, the site went places where amateur film makers show off their talent using YouTube. Not all television studios embraced the idea of their archived copyrighted footage being shared. Now eminent companies like NBC last week announced plans to work alongside YouTube, airing exclusive clips and trailers which gives us an indications of the power of the brand.

easyjet.com

It was a guy called Stelios that founded the company. It has over a 30 million passengers on a budget airline proposition. In 1995, after borrowing 30 million pounds from his dad, a shipping magnate, he leased two second-hand Boeings and began selling flights to Scotland for 29 pounds each way. EasyJet was the first low-cost British airline and, presciently, the first to start taking bookings over the internet. Then some time in 1997 he bought the domain easyjet.com for about 1,000 pounds and put up a proper website. At that time he had the telephone number in big letters on the side of the plane. And he put a different telephone number on the website. Week after week he watched how quickly the numbers were growing and that gave the confidence in April 1997 to launch a booking site.' He now boasts that the neatest and simplest way: 'you outsource the work to the customer' is through this innovation. This gives a view of us how this web site changed individualistic lifestyle of a consumer.

Amazon

Jeff Bezes founded the company in 1994. This created another revolution among youngsters when he positioned it among consumers for purchasing books, CDs and DVDs. It is in fact earth's biggest bookstore. He originally called it Cadabra, but Jeff Bezes thought again after his lawyer misheard it as 'cadaver'. He chose Amazon as something large and unstoppable and so, with current annual revenues of $8 billion, it has proved to be unstoppable. Though selling books (and now almost everything else) on a vast scale, it has tried never to forget the value of intimacy which is a learning to many of running business in the service sector.

myspace.com

Finally let me take myspace.com. Founded by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe in 2003. has over a 200m users already. It is essentially a social networking site. Initially there was little indication that the one-stop online friend-making shop but then once again consumers life changed and it was able to soon boast 100 million members and more page visits in Britain than the BBC.

The pair envisaged a site that would bring together all the qualities of existing online communities such as Friendster, Tribe.net and LiveJournal, with added features including classified adverts and events planning. They got the formula just right: the MySpace-opolis is growing by 240,000 a day, making it the fourth most-visited website in the world. DeWolfe believed that the key to the site's success is its founders' rapport with the people who use it. 'We looked at it from the point of view of how people live their lives,' he says.

The above are only a few innovations that have changed our lives dramatically. But the challenge is to identify what is in store for us in the time ahead which will again fashion a defence behavioural trend globally. I guess when an economy is growing at a 8.6 percent GDP growth one can just imagine the change Sri Lanka is about to witness before long.

The question remains whether we are ready to face such a change.