After the successful visit of Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is visiting India to address the two-day long event Internet.org summit (9-10 October), that is taking place in New Delhi.
Internet.org is the brainchild of Zuckerberg with the vision of making internet affordable and taking it places where even the term “internet” is an unknown entity. India is the second largest market for the social media giant and to sustain its growth, such an initiative makes complete sense to expand the market for Facebook.
With over a 100 million users logged in actively, from which 84 million actually access the social networking website from their mobile devices, the company sees a lot of potential in the country and in an effort to do so is building a Facebook that is lighter and will work on feature phones as well. With the recent acquisition of WhatsApp, the company envisions to achieve some of its target set with the Internet.org.
Zuckerberg’s visit is the third high profile visit after Amazon bigwig Jeff Bezos, and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella visited the country a few days ago.
Zuckerberg also plans to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi, along with other senior ministers tomorrow. With Modi interested in having an open and free internet media for everyone the meeting will certainly result in a big boost for both parties.
“India is an amazing country with unlimited potential. It is a place of big ambitions and Facebook is deeply committed to the country. We see lot of growth for us here. Tomorrow I’m meeting the Prime Minister. He is committed to connecting villages online and we are excited to see how Facebook can help,” Zuckerberg said while addressing a media interaction.
When Modi met Sanberg in July, he suggested the use of the website to improve the governance, and have better interaction with the public and boost tourism in the country.
Partnering with the other industry giants like Nokia, Qualcomm, Samsung, MediaTek, Opera and Ericcson; Facebook plans to enable internet to next five billion people. Also, it has partnered with FMCG giant Unilever to get a better understanding of the internet penetration in rural India and analyze its approach in the coming years.