by Angela Guess
Quentin Hardy has written an article for the New York Times regarding the utilization of Cloud Computing in poor countries. He writes, “In Tuesday’s article on Amazon Web Services, I wrote about lots of different data-crunching companies, mostly in the developed world. In the long term, however, as companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft sell computing everywhere, the most dramatic changes may be in places most of us do not now see. Already, places without clean water, decent sanitation or steady electricity are using supercomputers.”
He goes on, “Cheki is a used car classifieds business that serves up about a billion page views a month, mostly in Kenya and Nigeria. Most of the one million people using the site are looking at it with Android-based smartphones that cost about $70, according to Thomas Shaw, the company’s information technology manager. Imagine things in a few years, when Huawei, which makes most of the devices, gets those phone prices even lower. This appears to be changing markets in several other countries as well. ‘There are people in Malawi, Rwanda and Ethiopia looking at the cars, too,’ he says. Tariffs on cars are often high in these places, and a big market in another country may be a better way for them to buy.”
