Online population gives ‘huge opportunity’
The world’s online population will double to five billion by 2020 presenting “huge” business opportunities for tech start-ups on the cutting edge of the unprecedented expansion, according to president of Google Europe, Matt Brittin.
Speaking at the opening of his company’s fifth ‘campus’ for IT start-ups, in Warsaw, Poland, Brittin said: “The connected population is going to double in five years. Five billion online. Everyone with the entire Internet in their pockets. “That’s a huge opportunity,” he added. “This is a transformational period.
“Five years where we’ll go from a minority to a majority of the people on the planet being connected. That’s why the moment is now for start-ups to look up and out and think about that market of five billion people that you can connect with in the next five years.”
Google chose a renovated vodka distillery in a poorer area of the Polish capital for its first “campus” for IT business start-ups in eastern Europe.
Brittin said that although Google is a search engine, it has also become “a growth engine for entrepreneurs and for the economy”.
He continued: “Today we see millions of companies who are growing and exporting by accessing tools, talent, technology, sales and distribution around the world. We call them the ‘micro-multinationals’. Every start-up can be global from its birth.”
Poland’s new Minister for Development, Mateusz Morawiecki, said he hoped the tech hub would help stem the brain drain of young Poles to western Europe in search of better opportunities.
Over two million Poles have moved west, mostly to wealthier Britain and Germany, since their country joined the European Union in 2004.
