[MUSIC]

Well good afternoon.

It's been a really good day.

There's been some really good talks today.

I'm actually somewhat gutted that I won't be around tomorrow unfortunately.

so, I am going to press on because I am keenly aware

that I am sitting between you and some bear and I am going

talking about as Paul introduced, the, the, the bits of the Internet that

maybe you are not familiar with because they are, they are not here.

So I, I am going to start by talking about what's been

in the news, I guess, the last week and a half or so

was the, you know, the anniversary of the, the creation of the

web or the conception of the web was 'bout 25 years ago today.

And, as we all know, obviously the web was created by

an Englishman now of course, he didn't do this completely by himself.

The, the initial concept was revised with the help

of a Belgian computer scientist that he was working with.

And the first website, when it was

finally conceived that was actually built in France.

He was working at CERN at the time, but he was on the French side

of the border of the building that CERN had that kind of overlaps the border.

So he actually did it in France.

The computer he hosted it on was designed in California.

And the research institute he worked for was Swiss, so we've got

this kind of European, North American theme, which has kind of continued

ever since, you know a lot of the web standards groups, WC3

and so on based in Europe, based in North America and so on.

So that was then.

Now, 15 years on, if you start to look at the .com era,

we've got this point in time where the .coms were just going bust.

And you had all these big companies that all of a sudden were, were collapsing.

And the web at that point was still pretty much it was pretty, pretty

much Western on the whole, and on the whole, if you had to categorize it,

it was the Internet users were coming

from developed economies, primarily North America, Europe Japan,

Korea was kind of the only kind of Asian group that had a large demographic.

Little wee bit of Australia there at the top.

And, and, and that was it, you know, everybody else

was kinda squished into this, this remaining percentage, whatever that was.

I mean, it's less than 25% from the looks of it.

And, and that was 15 years ago.

And if you look at even the traffic and in

terms of the companies that were succesful at the time, right?

The Alexa top ten was entirely dominated by companies in developed economies.

And that you know again, Korea and Japan were some of the Asian versions.

But even then it was a lot of American

sites really just being more successful around the world.

If you think of the situation today,

things have actually started to shift quite considerably.

In developed economies where we

live, Internet penetration is nearing saturation.

Basically the, the darker blobs on the map are areas where.

Internet penetration is quite high, so the red ones

are 80%, 60 to 80% is kind of the orangey.

And as you see there's a large parts of

the world where the Internet penetration is still remarkably low.

Some of them you, you can barely see them because it's so low at this point.

What's changed though as well is that, the traffic

from these fast growing, emerging economies such as China,

Russia, India, that is actually starting to creep into

the Alexa Top 20, this time quite a bit, right?

So we've got, we've got two in the top ten, which is Baidu and QQ in China.

And then in the top 20 there's quite a few.

I mean actually number ten is, is Chinese as well.

So strikingly different picture from what we had 15, well I guess

it would have been about 15, not even 15 years ago really.

Yeah, I mean it, it has gone really quite quickly to actually kind of reverse it.

So, right now, we have close to three billion of

us that have yet to use the Internet at all.

And, really at the moment, it's generally

cha, characterized by people with lower incomes.

Again, if you look at the map, the, the blue areas are our high income groups.

And then, basically, everything else goes from upper middle to lower middle.

This giant group of people, four billion.

The bigger blob there is, incomes that are quite a bit lower than ours.

And so, all these people are the same

people who, in many ways, haven't come online yet.

Now, that is changing though and it's changing really, really quickly.

And, a lot of it has to do with devices like this, right?

This is a Chinese made Android device.

It's a customized version of Andriod for the

Chinese market, although it's, it's now expanding into

parts of Southeast Asia, India, and it will,

it is coming to North America and Europe.

And at the moment as it stands it's 83 Pounds for this device.

Now, I bought one of these two weeks ago

when we where in China, and it's really, really nice.

I don't have it with me today simply because I haven't gotten around to

put my SIM card in and yet decide that I am using it everyday.

But, I mean, this is a really nice phone, right?

And within a year or two the price will have dropped further.

I mean the idea of the sub-hundred dollar smartphone, which

everyone keeps talking about, in some ways it's kind of already

here, is at the sub-hundred dollar level is already pretty

good and is just getting better and better all the time.

So this is how a lot of people are going

to be coming online fairly rapidly over the next few years.

And certainly if you even look at the

sub-fifty dollar smartphones that are starting to be produced.

They are actually really quite good.

So, the thing is that the, the Internet that this next billion or

next three billion, on the whole once everybody's made it on the Internet

that they're going to discover isn't quite like our Internet, the, the one

that we're used to here or in the UK or, or, or the US.

And so that's what I'm going to talk about today.

And so I will start by talking about sheep.

And, the reason I'm going to talk about sheep is that

there's a whole bunch of sheep right now for sale on Instagram.

This is a website out of Kuwait and this gentleman is selling sheep.

He's got almost 25 hundred followers who are following his sheep feed on Instagram.

And you know, in, in Kuwait, this

is actually something that's become fairly popular there

was an article from a magazine from the region recently, that said if you have an

Instagram account, you can basically slap a tag on anything, take a picture of it,

and you sell it right, you put stuff online, put a price, and that's it, right?

And the lady goes on to say, you

know, even her grandmother has an Instagram business.

They call them Instagram businesses in some ways.

She's selling dried fruit.

So a friend's cousin is selling these

weird potted plant things that she's making.

So people are making these kind of hacked businesses.

And they're using Instagram as a platform.

Very ad hoc platform.

Really there's no shopping cart, there's no structure to it other

than, you know, the platform is there so people use it.

Now, Instagram in particular is really popular

in Kuwait, they even had a conference last

year for people to come and learn how to set up an Instagram based business.

But you know, there's similarities in, in other products around the world.

In Thailand, we've got about 10

thousand businesses doing something similar on Facebook.

And again, here, you know, just to, to be clear, again, there's no shopping

card, there's no Facebook API being used, or anything fancy, to do this, right?

It's just products being marketed, and in many ways,

sold entirely through Facebook as opposed to building a

website, and getting all organized the way, you know,

people sometimes do, and having an official business online.

So, what these business are kind of providing

us with is a glimpse of ki, a new

kind of, well it's very digital, it's very mobile

fueled, and mobile first in a lot of cases.

And it's, it's very much part of the informal

economy and you know, if you travel to any emerging

economy at all you, you often see people such

as this who have little you know, it's called the

informal economy and in the sense that people just

start businesses in a much more informal way than if

you were here, we would have to rent a shop,

and you would have to get permits and so on.

Not they're aren't sometimes permits involved, but it's a lot more ad hoc.

And that is what, you know, business in general has

looked like for the last thousand years in many ways before

the industrial revolution, and still persists in other areas and now

you've got the same thing except it's suddenly digitizing really quick.

So, these businesses, they're still very much ad hoc, I

mean when you see, if you see how she wants to

be contacted, I'm sure there's an email address here somewhere

but what she's mostly saying is contact me via instant messaging.

In here case she's got a line account, line is

one of the insatant messaging services out of Korea, I believe.

And that's what she uses as her point of contact.

On the other hand though, there's some really modern aspects,

some kinda more sophisticated aspects I mean, you know, every

day she posts the tracking numbers for the stuff that

she shipped right, and so she could be using DHL, UPS,

I mean the thing is that you've got this mixture

of really, really ad hoc, and then slightly more sophisticated,

and if you look back to Mr., Mr. Sheep Man,

I mean, again, he's got an Instagram account that he's posted.

He's got a phone number.

He has a WhatsApp number, and if you want to contact him on WhatsApp,

which is that popular app that Facebook

really, Facebook just purchased a few weeks ago.

He's using hash tags.

I mean, you know, the QA animals hash tag, is,

is, is a pretty kind of creative way to do it.

And he's got lots of fans.

So again I mean is this a, is this a business?

Is this not a business school?

In some ways of course it is because he's selling sheep.

And so these services they don't offer the traditional kind of, you know,

great user experience in quotes that we always talk about when we build products.

But they very much are good enough.

You know, they, they've got this really good balance

of offering the functionality that people need without too

much effort, or the level of effort that people

are comfortable with at that point, and they're really adaptable.

You can adapt them in many ways to your local circumstance.

And when they don't suit anymore, you just kind of move on to something else.

The other thing they do is in a lot

of emerging economies, they're filling some really interesting gaps.

So the stores in Thailand for, in particular, most of the traffic

from some of these sites is actually coming from the countryside, right?

So, these are people who don't have access to,

they don't go to Bangkok to shop everyday, they

don't have access to shopping malls and so, they're

kind of being under served both by brick and mortar.

But then potentially even by your regular

e-commerce, in the sense that the larger brands

might not ship out to the countryside as easily maybe it's a bit more complicated.

So they, they fill a gap from that point of view as well.

Now, reaching underserved communities, on the one hand you think of the countryside.

And you think of people in villages, and

but actually sometimes that's actually completely the opposite, right?

There are, it actually applies to other people, as well.

In the case of China, right?

So, China, China is huge.

China has 14 cities with populations over five million, which is pretty big.

And then it has another 41 cities with more than 2 million inhabitants, right?

I mean, it's just absolutely massive, right?

And the middle class in China is growing at

a rate of 80 thousand people per day, right?

So, these are people basically who are probably have, have a smart

phone, are starting to use e-commerce, 80 thousand new people a day.

So, reaching the people in the countryside, the 600 million that are in

the countryside is already enough of a problem that is a big problem.

But in some ways just as a big a problem as the flip side, right?

Is opening enough actual physical stores, to serve the urban population.

You know, it's, it's expensive, it's, it's ridiculously expensive in some

ways, to spread you know, flagship stores like this one absolutely everywhere.

So it's almost impossible in many ways, right?

To even just build the networks, whether

you're Apple, or whether you're Wal-Mart, or so

on, it takes a considerable amount of

effort, and maybe the return isn't necessarily there.

So, to many Chinese, shopping online isn't so much the electronic version

of the retail, the brick and mortar retail that they've always had, right?

I mean, in some ways, it is becoming the new commerce in

a lot of contexts, and consequently using their mobile, isn't just kind of

a modern alternative to using the PC again it, it's becoming the primary

and in a lot of cases the only means of using the Internet.

So there are other differences about

Chinese e-commerce that are, that're quite significant.

The first is basically what these stores

are actually selling and how they're organized.

So, if you look at the United States, and the UK is basically the

same, I think most of New York in many ways is, is basically the same.

I don't, just couldn't find any stats for it.

So you got almost 80% of online retail that involves individual merchants, right?

So you go to John Lewis, you might go to M and S, Curry's and so on.

In China, it's completely different.

90% of retail is sold through giant online marketplaces.

The individual retailers haven't even hit the market yet from that point of view.

And in some way, they, they never may, if things keep going the way they do.

So what these market places are, they're basically kind

of the virtual version of a traditional, again if

you look back to traditional markets from the last

1,000 years, you take those and you digitize them.

So you got lots of small vendors or

sometimes large vendors, but they're all grouped together, right?

So they enable basically customers and vendors to find each other.

But, that's, that's basically their role.

S,o the largest market place of its kind in China and probably globally

at this point in, in this category is, is T Mobile, by Alibaba.

Alibaba is a giant Chinese company with a lot of different interests.

So it's got about 180 million customers at the moment, and there's products

from about 150 thousand merchants and also 20 thousand well known brands.

And so T Mobile, what it does, is

it actually aggregates, very much slightly much larger brands.

So for an example the brands will actually pay

an entry fee and it will charge a commission.

And instead of the brands having set up their own store, so you have you

know, I think you've got Nestles, kind of

featuring there, you've got Coca-Cola and so on.

So, instead of really tiny merchants T Mobile is actually for much larger brands.

They pay the commission, they entered into the

store but then they get huge exposure, huge traffic.

There's APIs that they can tap into.

There's social media built in.

It's all mobile optimized.

It all works absolutely everywhere.

So it's just this giant platform that you can just basically plug right into.

And so, for major brands, including Apple they just set up

a store on T Mobile about three or four months ago.

her, hosting the virtual storefronts on T Mobile makes a lot of sense, right?

It's a really good alternative to having to open lots and lots of branches.

Of course they will still open branches in some of the larger cities in, in China.

There's a lot of large cities but in this case

you get access to a much larger audience much more quickly.

And it's still a legitimate well respected storefront, right?

I mean it's considered the place to go if you want to shop for official

Apple goods, you won't go to the Apple Store, you'll go to the store on T-Mobile.

Alibaba, again, a huge company.

So they also have a second product called Taobao.

Now Taobao is consumer to consumer, so it's

a little bit more like ebay in many ways.

And here you have smaller merchants.

It could be actual companies or it can be individuals.

And they sell products.

again, very similar to eBay.

They put their products online, there's a social aspect, you can follow

people that you like, you can get news feeds and so on.

But the vendors aren't limited to selling actual things.

And this is again where it starts to differentiate.

They're not simply selling, you know, books or electronics and so on.

You can also sell services.

In some ways, I don't think Taobao really cares

[LAUGH] what you're selling, as long as it's legal.

So for example, this is a travel agent on Taobao,

a fairly large travel agent from the looks of it.

And again, instead of having their own store, this is a store

that they've created using the API and the platform services on Taobao.

And they sell trips they also do things like arranging travel visas, right?

So the services that they offer are actually quite broad.

They can sell you SIM cards for your trip, they can sell you a Wi-Fi dongle, a subway

pass, basically anything that they could conceivably sell you

to make your trip more enjoyable, they will sell.

And they will do it entirely online through this platform.

So, a nice quote that I ran into awhile ago is that in some ways, is that all of

this, it's a mix of Amazon, eBay, and PayPal with a dash of Google, right?

So, you've got the commission based aspect, which is kind of like Amazon.

You've got the combination of C to C and B to C which is like eBay.

The PayPal bit we'll talk about in a moment.

And the Google is the advertising aspect.

In the case of Taobao there is no entry fee to

get in like you would charge Apple or Nestle and so on.

Instead, me, merchants can just post for free.

But then they, kind of, have to compete for your eyeballs.

And so they have to buy advertising to actually get you to find their stuff.

So there's all sorts of different models coexisting.

But in some ways there's something for absolutely

everyone, and it all kind of works together.

And so what you have is this whole family of sites.

And what it enables people to do is shop for this

huge range of products that they would otherwise never find, right?

And, you know, as an example you can buy cars.

You can buy a Lamborghini, you can buy

a Puget, there's entire car dealerships on TMobile.

So these sites are so successful these days that, certainly from an individual

perspective, running one of these shops is almost kinda like a national pastime.

Like a second job or a hobby.

People, you know, tens of thousands of people

from all walks of life just have these shops.

And, and they run them, and they manage them in different ways.

Then of course you also have

completely legitimate businesses or, or traditional businesses

that all of a sudden have entirely new audiences that they didn't have, right?

So you've got millions of jobs that are enabled through these platforms.

People in small town and rural communities, or they have

audiences that they would never have been able to reach.

So, just a couple of statistics, so by example by the end of 2012,

you have one million T-Mobile and Taobao

stores that were registered in rural areas.

Again this this are people who traditionally couldn't have

traded with you know, the whole entire county this way.

And the traffic from these sites accounted for more than,

[LAUGH] than one half of all parcel deliveries in China.

I mean, some of these numbers are just fantastically large.

So, this is China mostly that I've been

talking about, but the model is actually extending

around the world, and you know, it's working

because the circumstances are similar in other countries.

One example but not the only one is, is Jumia out of Africa.

Again, similar circumstances, people have phones but there are three

malls per 20 million inhabitants in some of these countries.

So in their way they're, they're looking at it as a

unique time to leapfrog over the whole idea of offline, right?

The whole idea of offline retail that we're so used

to, that's kind of fundamental to how we run our business.

They're just, popping right over it.

I mean, they can't put in

the infrastructure fast enough right now anyways.

But, they can put it up online.

The other thing that's really interesting that's happening

is that things are starting to cross pollinate, right?

So, this is just one example that I've been able to find.

But this is a retailer in the United

States, she's a lady who lives in California.

She has a beat business on Etsy.

She sells cake decorating stuff.

And she sources all of her stuff from tap, from Alibaba in in China, right?

So she sourcing all her raw material from China, getting it shipped over.

She finds it through these market places

in Asia, and then, she assembles products in

the US and she sells them back to Americans or, or whoever goes to Etsy.

You also have the other kind of way around, right?

This a small business out of Gandro just off

on the other side of Hong Kong on the mainland.

It's a family business, four or five people.

There's a tailor, a designer, kind of like a marketing person.

And they make Besboke clothing.

They put you know, nice photography

online, you can send your your measurements.

And they will make Bespoke fashion for you basically,

and they'll send it over by DHL or UPS.

And they're selling it on Etsy as well, right?

So using an American platform in this case to reach the entire world.

Because in some ways the, the Chinese

marketplaces aren't reaching quite that far yet.

And, and they are certainly coming our way.

So, the other thing that's happening.

I mean, again, you got lots of cross pollination happening right now.

Chinese consumers are really, really interested

in products from all around the world.

Matter of fact, all consumers in emerging economies are

very interested in, in, in buying stuff from everywhere.

So, as certainly in the case of China, what's happening

is you're also finding middlemen who are basically shipping stuff over.

So if a given brand, like I don't know, I've got a smoothie from Eat.

Well imagine this weren't food, but it were

something that people could actually ship over to China,

if there was enough of a demand, someone would find a way to get it over there.

They'd put it on TelBel or, well not Tmall cuz that's for official companies.

They put it on TelBel, and if there's

an audience, you know, they would keep doing it.

So you've got stuff going in all sorts of directions.

So what this is creating in some ways, is this very

fast growing group of these

highly globalized, digital first consumers, right?

So they live in one region, but they're actively

shopping and seeking out products from all over the world.

And in many, ways more so than we are.

I mean I, you know, I, I used to live in Thailand.

I love Thai music.

I can't find it over here.

It's really hard to.

In some ways I have less access to stuff from around the world, than

a lot of people from some of the emerging economies have the other way around.

Because of some of these ecosystems that are developing.

Now, of course one of the problems that

happens when you have this giant marketplaces again.

Some people have to advertize, for people to find them.

The social media plays a huge part, but still,

you know, how do you find stuff that you

like when you've got this store with, you know,

you got 50, 150 thousand stores in this big platform?

So, yet another thing that's developing.

So, This is a little bit of storytelling that I found from a company in China.

The source is underneath.

I've got sources for everything in all of this, and the

presentation is on SlideShare so, please check it out if you're interested.

So this is, this is Jing.

She's an affluent young Chinese girl who started blogging about her

life, and her style, while she was studying in the UK.

Right, now, she is now your competition.

Now, this is speaking outwards to British brands for

example who might want to market things in China.

All right, so, your competition isn't just

Chinese brands, it's even just individual consumers.

All right, so Jing is a marketer, she's got a micro

blog on Weibo, which is basically the Twitter equivalent in China.

It has 28,000 followers.

She blogs about her life, her style, beauty tips, and so on.

But, the, the catch really, is that she's also a retailer.

She has a Taobao shop, because anyone can set one

up, and she offers copies of luxury products that she

wears on her blogs, so she dresses up and then

takes photos, talks about them, and then she sells them back.

They're all limited edition, and it usually takes

her a couple of hours to sell out right.

So, what she does, is she promotes products on her

blog, on social media, on Instagram, anywhere she can find.

But, Taobao is where she transacts, because

the platform is available, and it's easy.

now, she is someone who sounds like

she's actually created a little business around this.

There's lots of other people who don't have the time or the energy to

actually do that much, but might still

want to participate in this type of environment.

So, what has developed in China is something that

they're, they're calling kind of an officially online shopping neighborhoods.

Again, this are platforms kinda like WordPress, anybody

can go and sign up, and, what online

shopping neighborhoods do, is they kinda do what

she's doing, but again as a platform, right?

So, they're online destinations, they're created by

social media, and they're fed by social media.

And where consumers can explore a curated section of choices of stuff.

So, basically it looks like Pinterest, in many ways it is Pinterest, but

with an entire transactional and, you know,

monetization endine, engine built underneath, which you

know, Pinterest hasn't necessarily done, and these

sites, there's quite a few of them

in China, and they're all category specific,

which is another reason why they work.

So, there'll be some entirely about

fashion, other ones about other things, right?

And so, as an example this is one of the most popular ones.

And I will probably butcher the way this is phrased.

it's, it's called Meilishuo.

If I'm pronouncing it even remotely correctly.

It's got 32 million users.

And just to get an idea, okay, maybe

so far this doesn't sound probably too exciting.

You've got, you know, girls posting pictures of sweaters.

You know, how big can this possibly be, right?

So, the company gets an, a cut from each outbound transaction.

It's like a, an online travel agent, right, you go to,

like, places like Sky Scanner, for example, and you look for flights.

And if you click through and you actually buy

a flight you, they'll get a cut from that, right?

So, they, this site generates five to six

million clicks for online merchants per day, right?

These are inbound links to actual merchants that are

selling things and they get a cut for it.

And in 20 mil, in 2012 they generated about 300 million

in revenue 300 million pounds in revenue, for these downstream merchants, right?

So these is, are, these are viable, useful parts of the ecosystem.

And, again, they are helping with the discovery.

The way you have the flight comparison

and, and so on insurance comparison sites, right?

And again, if it sounds a little bit, you know, wonky because

it's about fashion, I mean you could apply this to anything, right?

Geeks talking about gadgets, fans talking about books, the, the idea is

really, really sound, it's just not really being applied to other areas.

So, part of the reason that this all works so well, is that these

services, they feed into this kind of

virtuous circle, with mobile adoption and social media.

And when you look at, you know developed

economies, and places where there's higher internet penetration, over

on the right there, there's high internet penetration countries

like Australia, and Germany, and France, and so on.

Here you've emerging economies on the other side.

The emerging economies basically, they go, you know

as I've said, they go straight to social.

As soon as people are online, they start using social media.

So, there's this huge virtual circle that developed, where people instantly

start using these social technologies, which we don't necessarily get here.

We have a lot of people who are

very gradually coming to them, you know, proportionally speaking.

And China, in particular is completely crazy about social media,

there's a lot of cultural reasons for that as well.

But the ecosystems are quite substantial.

The difference, again, there's all these little subtle differences.

The social media services in China, a lot of them are actually full blown platforms.

Again, Facebook likes to call itself a platform.

Some of the Chinese ones are starting to exceed this quite considerably.

So, one of the most popular ones lately, and again there's ebbs and flows,

but at the moment, one of the, the hot ones really is called WeChat.

It's called Weixin in China.

This is a different version for the Chinese mainland, with a lot

more functionality than you can get with the outside of China version.

And it's mobile only.

They have a, a Mac client, which is kinda like

this token thing that allows you to connect your device.

But basically, 99% of the functionality is mobile entirely.

It's three years old, it has about 500 million users,

and it has become basically an overwhelming force in China.

This was a recent interview there's a link to

it, it was at the LeWeb conference, and [UNKNOWN] interviewed.

Hugo Barra, who is ex VP of Android product at Google, and

recently moved to China to work for one of the Chinese handset manufacturers.

And he basically talks about China quite a bit.

And he, you know, he says every single person he knows is on WeChat.

They don't use email anymore.

They don't use the phone.

They don't use SMS.

Everybody basically does everything through WeChat.

They talk.

They do business.

They do everything.

And, really the distinction with WeChat, is that

although it has kind of the normal messaging services.

You know, it's got text chat.

It's got group chat.

Video.

I mean, it's kinda trying to do all sorts of stuff.

It's got subscription content, photo blogging, and so on.

But the big bit is kind of the bit at the begi, at the bottom.

Which is it's got a super-customizable API,

a payment platform, and a virtual wallet.

So, there's a lot more you can do now, this is one of the slides

you hopefully you can, you can kind of see it, but again, it's all online.

What WeChat actually does, is it's kind of

created basically a platform inside of a platform, right?

So when you subscribe to brands you get

their lovely little icon, this is again within WeChat.

And then, what you're seeing all on the right, is

basically the, the whole experience created for these brands, right?

So the middle there for Uniqlo.

I don't know if you can see it.

But at the bottom here, there's a whole menu structure.

And, I've got a little sub-menu open.

I mean, you're basically creating a website,

inside of the app through the API.

And you can embed all sorts of services in there.

You can link to your website through it in a web view.

The other thing you can do is, you've

got this kind of interactive voice response type system

where, you know, for example, you can go to

Starbucks and you say I wanna know about coffee.

And so, they'll return to you, a little blurb with,

you know, other things that you can ask about coffee.

And then you can say okay, I wanna know about cappuccinos.

So, you can do support, customer support, and

all sorts of things through it that way.

So it's, again, it's a pretty robust platform inside of a platform.

And so again, if you're [LAUGH] if you're looking for any fragment

whatsoever of a one web idea in this [INAUDIBLE] it's completely not there.

I think, you know, in some ways, they're trying to own the entire

experience, and so far people are, you

know, liking it quite a bit, unfortunately.

But you know, part of it is the, the payments and the wallet platform

that's within it, all of this stuff is actually really useful to people, right?

So, as an example, that, at the

moment they're trying to grow the wallet platform,

they're trying to get people to sign

up their bank accounts into the wallet platform,

and so, they had a promotion for

Chinese New Year traditionally Chinese people give these

little red envelopes, physical envelopes with money

as gifts as Chinese, at Chinese New Year.

And they did a virtual version with a bit of a gamification aspect.

And in the space of 24 hours, you know,

they had five million people link their bank accounts to

WeChat, so that they could buy these envelopes, and

sent 20 million of them to friends all around China.

So, the scale is quite substantial.

hm, whoops.

So, the whole idea of virtual wallets, mobile payments, virtual finance it's

particularly also well in line with what a lot of emerging economies actually need.

There's a whole lot of local kind of challenges that we've, we've gone past.

I mean we've, we've had formal banking structures for many years.

People, the credit card penetration in the US

and the, you know, in Europe is quite high.

A lot of that is still coming into place in a lot of these countries.

Places like Indonesia, for example, where credit card penetration is as low as 15%.

So, obviously when you're talking about

e-commerce, you've got these crazy challenges.

Cuz everything's normally dependant on, well, for one things,

credit cards is, is a large part of it.

So, all these structures are developing instead, right?

Some of them are completely leapfrogging.

And other ones are just adapting differently.

A lot of you may have heard potentially

about this already, but in countries such as Kenya,

India, the Philippines, there are entirely virtual banks that

have been set up, that run entirely on phones.

As, as low as really tiny little feature phones,

all the way up to whatever someone would have.

And you can deposit money, you can send and receive money, you

can pay for stuff, you can pay for online and offline purchases.

You could go to the shop and pay for something with it, but you

could also make a purchase online and you could link it through this virtual

account, and you do it all through your mobile phone, and it doesn't matter

if you have some horrible, little Motorola from 15 years ago, you, it still works.

So, that's one of the strategies that they've got.

Another thing is that cash on delivery is still very, very, very popular in a lot of

southeast Asia, a lot of Africa, in China as well and just as an alternative.

Because you can't actually pay by credit card and then there's also all sorts

of ways to pay by bank, but pay after the fank, fact by bank.

Another problem people have again, if you've got all these big marketplaces.

Tons and tons of vendors how do you know that you're gonna get something legit?

You know, right?

How do you know you're not gonna get a counterfeit item of

some sort, and how do you, how do you trust the these vendors?

So, in the case of China, in particular, because these marketplaces are so huge.

Alibaba has set up Alipay, which is its, its kind of

virtual wallet and payment platform that goes with Taobao and Tmall.

So, Alipay is kind of linked in, and, what

it does, is it doubles as an escrow service.

So, it doesn't actually re, rec It doesn't actually release the payments to

the vendors, until people have received the goods, and the goods are okay.

So, it kind of has established trust that way

and it [UNKNOWN] acts, you know, even more than PayPal

where you can basically say oh, i got my thing

but I don't like it or it didn't work out.

In the case of Alibaba, the money doesn't even get released.

So, what's happened with a lot of these

platforms is, because their so useful they've become.

In some ways, the started as one thing, and then they become something

else, so Alipay in particular has 800

million registered users, so it's slowly kind

of seeped out into everything, and you can now use it, again, to

pay for things offline and online, kind of like the virtual banks in Africa.

You can pay for school fees you can, you

can pay for loans mobile phone bills, hospital charges.

They even have investment products now, especially if you're a vendor on Alibaba,

and you already have, you have money that's stored there on a regular basis.

You can actually stick it in an investment fund, while it sits there.

Basically, anything they can do to keep your money in the system.

but, you know, it, it's actually valuable to people.

The other thing that's kind of interesting is that,

you know, some of these are brand new platforms, right?

They haven't been around for very long.

But the prior generation of emerging economies, and even some of the current

ones, there are platforms like this that have been in place now for decades.

in, in Korea and in Hong Kong there are services that started as very

similar to our Octopus card here in the UK oh, sorry, our Oyster card.

I always mix them up.

The oyster card in the UK to pay for the tube.

But just imagine if ten years later, the oyster card

were used to pay for Starbucks and your restaurant bill.

And you could use it as an entry card to get into your hotel room.

And you could use it to pay for almost anything.

You could use it even for online payment, right?

So, a lot of these started with one kind of

technology, which might have been RFID and a little card.

And they keep adding new technologies along the way.

Almost all of them are mobile, which is why it's worked so well.

And so, they just become, they keep getting more and more useful and relevant.

okay, not too much time left so, now all of this have

all been kind of you know, very kind of serious things, right?

You're shopping for stuff and you're paying for hospital bills and so on.

But because people are used to having

all these virtual currencies, you know, instead of

paying for real stuff, why not just make new stuff up to pay for, right?

So one of the interesting platforms in China right now is called YY.

It's kind of like a giant Google hangout, it does streaming video.

300 million users, about 11 million channels.

Lot's of karaoke, there's talk radio.

There's people doing educational stuff on it.

All right, so it sounds pretty much like a lot of the platforms we have.

The big difference again, is that everything is monetized, right?

So, it has its own virtual currency.

So, what people do, is they'll set up a channel, and they might have

a news program or whatever they do every night, or they might sing every night.

There's an awful lot of singing.

And they develop an audience, and the audience

will send them virtual gifts, and they cost as

much as a P or 2P or so, you know, it's really easy to send virtual gifts.

There are roses and lollipops and things.

Some of the gifts are much more expensive.

And again, it's the scale that makes it really interesting.

Some people are making substantial amounts of money on this thing As, you

know, as far people can tell anyways from the various articles that I've read.

As much as, you know, 15,000 pounds a month in virtual gifts that are being

received by people doing things like, you know,

doing Photoshop lessons, streaming Photoshop lessons every night.

In Korea there's even this lovely gentlemen who apparently kind of sings

and dances while eating noodles every

night and has a ridiculously large following.

[LAUGH] and you know again, it's all virtual gifts.

It's, I,I mean, I don't know what you would call this, right?

But it's a new kind of, type of, a new type of kind of business and monetization.

so, mobile devices are the glue in all of this.

I mean, most of this would just not work without mobile.

It kind of binds everything together.

Even to the point where some of

these platforms are, you know, completely linked.

To things that here we don't consider particularly useful.

So, WeChat, for example, is, all

the functionality's built around QR codes, right?

Every single WeChat user has their own code.

It comes in the app.

You can even customize the way it looks.

And so, if you want to follow a brand, a person, if you want

to check into some place, all you have to do is scan the QR code.

And it does a lot of this for you.

And, the reason why this works, again you get this virtual circle happening, is that

in China in particular, but certainly in other

parts of Asia, QR code readers are everywhere.

You don't have to download one.

You don't have to worry about whether your phone will have one.

Most of the apps you have will have one, right?

So on the right over there is the Baidu web

browser, which is one of the really popular ones in China.

If you look up a the very top there, there's a QR code reader built in.

It's there, it's always there.

You don't have to think about it.

The one in the middle is just a random travel app.

It's a well popular brand, but it's a travel app.

You know, why would it need a QR code?

Well, why not in some ways?

So once absolutely everyone has one, then everyone starts to use them.

They're even being built right into the camera, which they should

of been all along, and they have been in Japan since forever.

But some of the brands have actually built them in.

And, and some of them even have put WeChat recognition in the QR code itself.

So, it kinda fast tracks we cat, WeChat adoption through the camera.

So, interacting with WeChat or, or interacting with QR codes is

kind of mundane, and transacting with QR codes is kind of mundane.

Everybody does it.

And so, what's starting to happen now, is

that again, all of these things is developed as

mobile, but these companies are so big, they're starting

to think, okay, well how do we take the.

Online, mobile thing offline, so they're all starting to partner with department

stores, you know, any brand that has brick and mortar that they can tie into.

To start to create an ecosystem where basically, you can pay for

anything anywhere with one of these platforms, with one of these apps.

A lot of it scanning QR codes, kind of like this example

that Barclay Card is trialing with John Lewis where you, you scan this.

And then, you know, somebody will deliver the

suitcase to you, except the scale is fundamentally larger.

These, there's just so many people who can do this compared, to, for example, in the

UK, I don't know, there might be a

few million who could actually take advantage of this.

So, these brands and consumers, they're not

just kind leapfrogging the desktop or the.

For finance, or physical retail.

They're almost kinda living in this giant rapid prototype, right?

And it's the numbers, right?

PayPal, 25 billion in mobile transactions in 2013.

Alipay, 150 billion.

So, when you experiment at that scale, it,

well you, you're experimenting at a much larger scale.

You can, you can figure out what's working.

You can do A, B testing.

You can do all sorts of stuff that.

At a level that, at, at the moment, we're, we're not yet capable of doing.

And so, the people who live in, in a lot

of these countries, they're almost, you know, living in a

world where offline, online, mobile, all these words are rapidly

becoming irrelevant and certainly, in the future, they probably will be.

And part of it is they have, they don't have the baggage that we have.

They don't have the structures that they need to then, you

know, tear down so they can put these new ones in.

They don't have to worry about what's normal

and, you know, they can just take, okay,

we've got these opportunities we've got these constraints,

we can kinda turn one into the other.

And the cool thing is, that they can

also really experiment with kind of weird stuff, right?

Even if it's crazy, in some ways, why not at this point, right?

So, one or two last little examples there's

a Russian e-commerce brands e-commerce brand called Lamoda.

So, in Russia there's really poor postal infrastructure.

You can't get stuff to places in time.

You can't track it, there's all sorts of problems.

So, they're like, okay, well why don't we just completely turn this around.

We wanna sell people stuff online.

We've got bad postage infrastructure.

Okay, so what do you do?

So, what they've done, is they've hired a fleet of delivery people.

They deliver stuff as you normally would to a person's home.

But they bring extra stuff.

They bring stuff to up-sell.

They bring accessories that might come with the thing that you've just bought.

They give you 15 minutes to try it on.

If you don't like it, they'll handle the.

Taking it back for you.

If you like more stuff, they'll let you pay for the more, the more stuff.

[LAUGH] And it's cash on delivery, a lot of it, because they, they

have similar problems with credit cards, and

other issues with credit cards in Russia.

And so, you know, they've basically taken all these weird constraints, and

turned them into an opportunity to

actually make people, in some ways, happier.

Apparently, this is working quite well,

even though it appears completely unscalable.

In Korea, you've got stuff like this, and

you've probably seen this before, cuz it was

actually started by Tesco but a lot of the subway systems in APAC are very, very new.

So they're all completely enclosed, you can't see the

tracks the way you can still in the tube here.

So, you've got these big walls that ,you

know, have nothing on them except advertising usually.

So, they setup virtual stores on the

walls, there's QR codes all over there, and

as you're waiting for the subway to get in, you can scan and you can

click, and then you probably have a wallet platform somewhere on there, and you can

buy stuff and it'll be delivered to your house by the time you get home.

Other little crazy virtual stunt that has happened recently.

There's a grocery store chain, again, entirely off online.

Right?

So again, a lot of these are kind

of online people moving offline or vice versa.

So this online grocery chain, they set up.

A thousand virtual reality branches.

So, it's, it's almost like geocaching, but with grocery shopping.

So, you know, if you walk to a certain spot in London,

you could open your app, and you would be able to shop.

But then if you leave the spot, you wouldn't.

I mean, it was a complete stunt.

But at the same time, all of a sudden, they had a thousand new

stores that they didn't have yesterday, and it created a lot of publicity, right?

And, you know, one last example, there was an article in

I think it was just in Wired just a few weeks ago.

You know, talking about Africa, you know, so why build expensive roads in

remote rural locations, when you can get drones to deliver stuff for you?

So you know, I mean, on the one hand,

it sounds completely crazy, but you know, why not?

Again, the infrastructure isn't there, what can you do instead?

And if you start thinking about the Lamoda example, with the up-selling at the door.

Well, if you got the drones to deliver it, and they could

deliver more stuff and then they could even order stuff for you.

When you start thinking about ecosystems where

there's nothing there, and you can put stuff

in, and you can experiment with stuff, you can come up with some really crazy ideas.

So, the rise of mobile and the

internet, it's already changed our world beyond recognition.

So we really don't know what's going to happen next.

What we do know however, is that the future the

opportunities will be so much more global than they've ever been.

And if you want to be able to meet

the challenges, and, and compete in this new market place.

The one thing that's really important to remember.

Is that things might seem futuristic to us in many ways, they

might just simply feel kind of new and practical to other people.

And this is a great quote just from a few weeks ago from the

Economist, to wes, to Westerners, mobile banking is a new way to do something old.

But to many Africans, it's simply the obvious way to do something new.

And that's it.

Thank you very much.

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