

Nigerian Internet use increasing - OoTheNigerian
http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=it_net_user&idim=country:GBR&dl=en&hl=en&q=internet+penetration#met=it_net_user&idim=country:GBR:EGY:NGA:SWE:ZAF

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arnorhs
Perhaps even more relative: internet penetration of the 16 largest countries
by population:

[http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-
wdi&met=it_net_us...](http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-
wdi&met=it_net_user&idim=country:GBR&dl=en&hl=en&q=internet+penetration#met=it_net_user&idim=country:USA:IND:CHN:BRA:PAK:IDN:BGD:NGA:PHL:VNM:DEU:EGY:ETH:MEX:RUS:JPN)

~~~
adityakothadiya
Wow! China is a huge market. I know it was very big, but didn't know it's this
huge. I wonder if China has equally good Startup ecosystem like USA which
promotes innovation and entrepreneurship. Also, another question is - do US
startups even have a strategy to focus equally on Chinese market like US
market? If yes, how do they go about doing that?

~~~
Retric
Don't be fooled, if you consider income or even worse spending China is still
a tiny market. 20 years from now it might be far more important, but for now
it only has a voracious appetite for a small number of imports such as Oil and
industrial secrets.

~~~
elai
I've seen thai school teachers spend $10s of dollars on facebook games. In
thai school teacher wages, that is something like like 3% to 10% of their
monthly wage, which is significant. Don't underestimate a market like china.
Protection from psychological traps like bad spending and keeping up with the
jonses tend to be less there too unfortunately/fortunately.

It's somewhat like ignoring the teenager market.

------
jeb
The president of Nigeria already has 126k fans on facebook
<http://www.facebook.com/jonathangoodluck> and 1700 comments for each of his
daily posts.

That's impressive considering that his account is just a couple of months old.

~~~
acangiano
That's small consolation to him; his brother, former president of Nigeria,
died last year leaving several million dollars behind. They are currently
trying to recover them through the aid of western citizens.

~~~
jeb
See here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1525639>

~~~
acangiano
Note that the two statements are quite different. The guy you replied to was
implying that all Nigerians are scammers. I, on the other hand, implied no
such a thing and simply made a joke about a type of fraud commonly originating
from Nigeria.

~~~
jeb
It's about as funny as a joke about how Americans will invade your country, or
italians will murder your cousin.

Pointless jokes about silly stereotypes do not belong on forums where people
try to discuss reasonably about things.

~~~
nsfmc
whoosh!

~~~
jeb
I get the joke. But it's not funny. I've read the same joke about 1000 times
on various forums. It's just a somewhat mean statement with no humour at all.

------
natch
Is it really fair to say that people in China have access to the Internet?
Maybe it's better to say that they have access to some AOL-ized version of the
Internet, not the actual Internet itself. The difference between an open
Internet and a closed one is not just a small difference of degree; they are
entirely different things.

~~~
jeb
There are about 20 or 30 websites blocked in china. Not that many.

~~~
albertzeyer
A very extreme underestimation.

* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Peop...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Peoples_Republic_of_China)

* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_notable_websites_blocke...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_notable_websites_blocked_in_the_Peoples_Republic_of_China)

* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_words_censored_by_searc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_words_censored_by_search_engines_in_the_Peoples_Republic_of_China)

~~~
jeb
About 30 notable websites are blocked, counting from the list you posted.

~~~
ErrantX
Even if an accurate representation of the firewall (which it doesn't seem ot
be) are you arguing this is acceptable?

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toysta
A more meaningful graph will be one that shows the % of population with
internet access

------
pan69
If shown in percentage...

------
Mz
The first thing I thought when reading the title ("Graphs don't lie :) ) was:

"There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damn lies and statistics." Presumably,
graphs fall under "statistics".

~~~
troymc
I cringe when I see that quotation trotted out as some kind of truth. It's a
joke, popularized by Mark Twain.

Statistics can be insignificant or misinterpreted, but the statistics
themselves aren't lies: they are statements of fact (measurements and
calculations based on those measurements). Statistics are some of the best
tools we have for teasing meaning out of measurements.

(If the "measurements" are actually made up, then yes, they are lies, but then
the fault is with the person cooking the measurements, not the statistical
tools they bring to bear. One can also misuse statistical tools, but again,
the problem is with the user, not the tools.)

~~~
Mz
I always felt that the quote indicated that statistics are easily used to
mislead with credibility. When I homeschooled my sons, I gave them a choice
between the algebra/geometry/calc track and a statistics track. They chose
statistics. An interesting book we included in our studies was "How to lie
with statistics". (FWIW: I think there was a later book called something like
"How to lie with charts and graphs".)

My point was not that statistics are lies but just that the statement "Graphs
don't lie" isn't some kind of unquestionable grand truth.

------
motters
Interesting, that means that a very high proportion of UK citizens are
connected to the internet, since the population is about 60 million.

------
magma
The data on India is interesting. I would have thought there would be more
than 50 million internet users in India. That's only about 4 per 100 people.

<http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.BBND.P2>

These numbers might be projections

~~~
jeb
India is not particularly well off. It has a higher poverty rate than Africa,
for example.

~~~
w1ntermute
Is there something I'm missing?

Africa is 45.78% <http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=africa+poverty+rate>

India is 25% <http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=india+poverty+rate>

~~~
jeb
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/14/poverty-india-
af...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/14/poverty-india-africa-
oxford)

~~~
w1ntermute
_There are more poor people in eight states of India than in the 26 countries
of sub-Saharan Africa_

That doesn't say anything about the poverty rate.

 _When the vast central Indian Madhya Pradesh state, which has a population of
70 million, was compared with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the war-
racked African state of 62 million inhabitants, the two were found to have
near-identical levels of poverty._

So that means certain parts of India have equal or greater levels of poverty
than certain parts of Africa. But the poverty rate as a whole is lower.

------
atomical
Are there any web startups in Nigera that have been acquired or make
significant profit?

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prodigal_erik
46k of script and no HTML for it to progressively enhance. That's really
disappointing; web authoring at Google is usually highly competent.

------
known
I believe increased Internet use

    
    
          Will create jobs
          Will decrease crude oil consumption

~~~
mahmud
Nigerians are not the primary consumers of their own oil. No oil producing
nation is.

~~~
fragmede
That sounds good, but whats your definition of an oil producing nation? I'd
guess the meager amount of oil produced in the US _is_ consumed by the US.

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svag
It would be interesting to see also the quality of internet access, like PSTN
or DSL etc and if there is any cencorship...

~~~
aitoehigie
There is no web censorship in Nigeria, only ISP's might ban a user from their
network if a report was made about that user. The average 'broadband' speed in
Nigeria is 200-400kbps and mostly wireless access. But with the completion of
the MainOne submarine cable, it is expected that things here will change for
the better. Nigeria's population is huge, 150million although the purchasing
power of the average citizen is low, It's a strong emerging market.

------
ciupicri
Is there a non-Flash version?

~~~
josefresco
Yeah same here, I'm sh*t out of luck on my iPad. So are most mobile users,
where's the accessibility Google?

------
fauigerzigerk
Right, so finally we learn that the US is a bigger country than Sweden. Great.

------
hackermom
Based on that graph's numbers (dated 2008) combined with each country's 2009
population census (a percentile or two off, I know...):

    
    
      Nigeria: 15%
      United Kingdom: 75%
      Egypt: 17%
      South Africa: 8%
      Sweden: 85%

~~~
jeb
But look at the rate of growth...

~~~
hackermom
Yes it's impressive, if time stood still and politics never changed, but
that's not how the world works :) Everyone knows from the lesson of
"retrospectivity" that growth can be just a temporary rise, or just the spike
before a decline etc.

If we look at the UK's numbers in that same graph, after having travelled back
to 2002 in our time machine, we could also say "but look at the rate of growth
the past 4 years!", but looking back at the graph _today_ , with "8 years
later" of extra data...

My underlying point was that no mistake in graphs and statistics is as common
as the repeated mistake of us trying to predict the future from contemporary
numbers, and _always_ ending up being wrong a few years later down the road.
Statistics need lots of time to mature and settle.

------
keyle
China freaks me out.

------
seiha
The first thing that came to mind when I saw the graph was, "Geez, there's a
quite a rise in scammers in Nigeria."

~~~
jeb
25 million pretty normal people would not find your statement very nice. The
U.S sends a lot of Viagra spam - but that does not mean that all the internet
users are sending viagra spam.

Spam reaches a lot of people, because that's its intent. Extrapolating from
spam is silly.

