It was so simple that even the least technical person in the room could understand it… And yet it was already well on its way to giving the Internet its biggest push forward since its very advent.
No, this technology wouldn’t give users the ability to stream email directly into their brains or project three-dimensional websites onto thin air.
In fact, from the typical Western standpoint, what this technology did was a major step backward.
What most Westerners don’t know is that, despite the fact that 93% of the world’s inhabited surface is covered by 2G or better cellular service and that as of this moment, there are more active cellular devices than there are human beings, 60% of the world’s population still has no access to Internet.
None.
The map below shows by percentage of population just how many people don’t get it.
With Internet available from thin air almost anywhere you go, the only real obstacle to near-universal adoption is the cost of service.
Perhaps the best example possible is the world’s second most populous nation: India.
As of the latest figures supplied by InternetLiveStats.com (numbers will certainly change minutely in the hours between my writing this article and you seeing it), there are 462,124,989 Internet users in India, with less than half of them having home access.
That leaves more than 864 million Indians with no access at all.
Once again, a lack of cell phones is not the problem. Cellular service and cellular devices are more prevalent and more numerous than plumbing and toilets. This isn’t an exaggeration, either. It’s simple fact.
Where there is no electricity, solar-powered charging stations like the ones below are being installed in the remotest parts of the country.
But because the average per-capita income for that nation is $100 a month, something even as basic as a $5 a month data plan is simply outside the reach of even the average consumer.
The Most Complicated Problem… The Simplest Solution
It got one group of people thinking: What if it were possible to, say, cut that cost down…. by a factor of 10?
What if they could provide near-unlimited access for pennies, not dollars?
It wouldn’t be the fastest. There would certainly be some drawbacks and limitations. But for nearly 900 million people, it could mean their first-ever access to an informational and social networking tool that’s been transforming the developed world for more than two decades.
It was a great idea in concept, but the execution was a far bigger problem. The only real way to provide data that’s an order of magnitude cheaper is to find a way to crunch that data down, also by an order of magnitude.
Crunching data down is possible, but it had never been achieved at factors of greater than three… so increasing that effect by at least another factor of three seemed daunting.
But then, as usually is the case with apparently unsolvable problems, a deceptively simple solution came around that didn’t just achieve the requirements, but far surpassed them.
When all was said and done, this group of researchers was able to compress bandwidth not by a factor of 10… but 30.
It would allow for nearly unlimited access to all of the world’s websites, as well as plain-text email capability and usage of popular social media platforms like Facebook, at a cost of less than $0.50 per month.
But how did it work? How was it possible? It had to be some sort of programming voodoo, right?
Not at all.
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Technological Sleight of Hand
The idea was simple. Typically, when you use a mobile device like a tablet or smartphone to access a webpage, you type in the URL and are immediately sent information from the server belonging to that website — say Google Finance.
But with this software, when you enter the Google Finance web address, it doesn’t take you to Google; it takes you to a remote cloud-computing database, which accesses the Google website, takes a static image (or a screenshot), and then transmits that image back to your device.
Lacking all of the buttons and links and everything else that a complex webpage might contain, that static image requires only a fraction of the data.
But then how do you click? How do you browse?
The real genius part comes from the interactivity. If you want to click a link, you simply do as you always did — you touch it with your finger.
When you do that on a device equipped with this system, that touch generates a set of coordinates, which are then sent back to this remote cloud, a click is registered remotely, and the new page is loaded, also remotely.
A new static image is taken and sent back once again, and the process starts over.
Email, web-browsing, and message composition is done through plain text and is extremely light on data usage as well.
The result is Internet plans for $0.50 a month or less — the cheapest in the world today.
Best of all, with data compressed of this magnitude, loading pages, even with 2G connections, only takes a few seconds.
At 3G speeds, fractions of a second.
Suddenly, one of humanity’s most transformative inventions ever becomes available to billions worldwide who could never dream of it otherwise.
That leaves just one problem: the devices themselves.
The solution, again, had to be a cut in cost from hundreds of dollars to dozens.
The company this group of researchers established had already solved that problem.
The tablet they’d designed to run their software cost less than $50.
If these advancements don’t sound like miracles of modern electrical and software engineering, then they definitely sound like the innovations of a giant, multinational company.
A Google, perhaps, or a Samsung.
The Biggest Untapped Market There Is
Well, when I heard the same explanation I just gave you at an investment conference I attended in Toronto earlier this week, the name Samsung did come up — but it wasn’t the company giving the presentation.
The CEO giving the talk mentioned Samsung because his company, the patent-holder of this technology and the producer of these sub-$50 tablets, just a month earlier surpassed Samsung as the number one provider of tablet PCs in the very market I was talking about earlier: India.
A nation of 1.32 billion.
But that’s still not why every investor, fund manager, broker, and analyst in the room had their ears perked.
The reason was that this company, which had just unseated the multibillion-dollar giant and one of the world’s biggest tech brands, was itself just a tiny tech company, with a market cap barely over $40 million.
$40 million — about 1/4,000 times the size of the Goliath it had just knocked out of one of the world’s fastest-growing yet most-untouched consumer markets.
Almost 900 million potential users… in India alone.
So why is this company still a secret? Well, it won’t be for much longer.
To get the rest of the story on what it is, the partnerships it’s building to spread its product, and what it’s about to do for the 4 billion people who still cannot get online, click here.
Fortune favors the bold,
Alex Koyfman
Check us out on YouTube!His flagship service, Microcap Insider, provides market-beating insights into some of the fastest moving, highest profit-potential companies available for public trading on the U.S. and Canadian exchanges. With more than 5 years of track record to back it up, Microcap Insider is the choice for the growth-minded investor. Alex contributes his thoughts and insights regularly to Energy and Capital. To learn more about Alex, click here.
