BANGALORE: American technology companies desperately want to win over people like Rakesh Padachuri and his family.
Padachuri, who runs a construction business in this city, the center of India's technology industry, uses his smartphone to reserve movie seats through BookMyShow and to order pizzas from Domino's. His wife, Vasavi, orders clothes from Myntra and Amazon.com, and downloads videos and games from YouTube and the Google Play store to entertain their 4-year-old daughter. His sister-in-law, Sonika, enjoys posting selfies on Facebook and follows the YouTube musings of Lilly Singh, an Indo-Canadian comedian.
They all stay in touch via a group chat they have set up on WhatsApp, a free messaging service owned by Facebook. "There's no need to call each other," Padachuri said during a visit last month at his family's home, which is next to a Best Western hotel. There's barely a need to leave the house — groceries, a birthday cake, even a hairdresser can be summoned via an app.
The Padachuri family's love of technology helps explain why India and its 1.25 billion residents have become the hottest growth opportunity — the new China — for American internet companies. Blocked from China itself or frustrated by the onerous demands of its government, companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter, as well as start-ups and investors, see India as the next best thing.
"They are looking at India, and they are thinking, 'Five years ago, it was China, and I probably missed the boat there. Now I have a chance to actually do this,'" said Punit Soni, a former Google executive who was lured back to India recently to become the chief product officer of Flipkart, a Bangalore e-commerce start-up similar to Amazon.
The increasing appeal of India, now the world's fastest growing major economy, was underscored in recent days.
During a meeting in Seattle on Wednesday with American technology executives, China's president, Xi Jinping, was unwavering on his government's tough internet policies.
India's Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, on the other hand, was on a charm offensive during his own American tour.
READ ALSO: Full text of Modi's speech at Digital India event
Special coverage: PM Modi's US visit
After a stop in New York City, he headed to Silicon Valley, where he visited Tesla and attended a dinner with tech chieftains like Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Sundar Pichai of Google.
On Sunday, Modi will join a town hall discussion with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive. He also plans to drop by Google and Stanford University, mingle with start-up entrepreneurs and address a sold-out arena of 18,000 people, mostly Indo-Americans, in San Jose, Calif.
On Monday, he will be back in New York to meet with President Obama.
The message to Silicon Valley from Modi, who tweets and posts regularly on Facebook: Help India become an internet powerhouse.
Two years ago, India's rise as a digital nation was hard to imagine. Internet penetration was modest, mobile phone networks were glacially slow, and smartphones were a blip in a sea of basic phones.
Since 2013, however, the number of smartphone users in India has ballooned and will reach 168 million this year, the research firm eMarketer predicts, with 277 million internet users in India expected over all.
India already conducts more mobile searches on Google than any country besides the United States. Yet "we are barely scratching the surface of availability of internet to the masses," said Amit Singhal, Google's senior vice president in charge of search, who emigrated from India to the United States 25 years ago.
Reaching the unconnected billion
Indians have long loved to connect with each other online, accounting for much of the growth of early social networks like Friendster. So it's not surprising that Facebook already has 132 million Indian users on its social network, trailing only the United States.
But Facebook's presence in India runs even deeper. WhatsApp, the messaging service
India replaces China as next big frontier for US tech companies - The Times of India
Padachuri, who runs a construction business in this city, the center of India's technology industry, uses his smartphone to reserve movie seats through BookMyShow and to order pizzas from Domino's. His wife, Vasavi, orders clothes from Myntra and Amazon.com, and downloads videos and games from YouTube and the Google Play store to entertain their 4-year-old daughter. His sister-in-law, Sonika, enjoys posting selfies on Facebook and follows the YouTube musings of Lilly Singh, an Indo-Canadian comedian.
They all stay in touch via a group chat they have set up on WhatsApp, a free messaging service owned by Facebook. "There's no need to call each other," Padachuri said during a visit last month at his family's home, which is next to a Best Western hotel. There's barely a need to leave the house — groceries, a birthday cake, even a hairdresser can be summoned via an app.
The Padachuri family's love of technology helps explain why India and its 1.25 billion residents have become the hottest growth opportunity — the new China — for American internet companies. Blocked from China itself or frustrated by the onerous demands of its government, companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter, as well as start-ups and investors, see India as the next best thing.
"They are looking at India, and they are thinking, 'Five years ago, it was China, and I probably missed the boat there. Now I have a chance to actually do this,'" said Punit Soni, a former Google executive who was lured back to India recently to become the chief product officer of Flipkart, a Bangalore e-commerce start-up similar to Amazon.
The increasing appeal of India, now the world's fastest growing major economy, was underscored in recent days.
During a meeting in Seattle on Wednesday with American technology executives, China's president, Xi Jinping, was unwavering on his government's tough internet policies.
India's Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, on the other hand, was on a charm offensive during his own American tour.
READ ALSO: Full text of Modi's speech at Digital India event
Special coverage: PM Modi's US visit
After a stop in New York City, he headed to Silicon Valley, where he visited Tesla and attended a dinner with tech chieftains like Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Sundar Pichai of Google.
On Sunday, Modi will join a town hall discussion with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive. He also plans to drop by Google and Stanford University, mingle with start-up entrepreneurs and address a sold-out arena of 18,000 people, mostly Indo-Americans, in San Jose, Calif.
On Monday, he will be back in New York to meet with President Obama.
The message to Silicon Valley from Modi, who tweets and posts regularly on Facebook: Help India become an internet powerhouse.
Two years ago, India's rise as a digital nation was hard to imagine. Internet penetration was modest, mobile phone networks were glacially slow, and smartphones were a blip in a sea of basic phones.
Since 2013, however, the number of smartphone users in India has ballooned and will reach 168 million this year, the research firm eMarketer predicts, with 277 million internet users in India expected over all.
India already conducts more mobile searches on Google than any country besides the United States. Yet "we are barely scratching the surface of availability of internet to the masses," said Amit Singhal, Google's senior vice president in charge of search, who emigrated from India to the United States 25 years ago.
Reaching the unconnected billion
Indians have long loved to connect with each other online, accounting for much of the growth of early social networks like Friendster. So it's not surprising that Facebook already has 132 million Indian users on its social network, trailing only the United States.
But Facebook's presence in India runs even deeper. WhatsApp, the messaging service
India replaces China as next big frontier for US tech companies - The Times of India
