chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk writes: when i co-edited the 2025 report in 1984 with my farher the economist's norman macrae usa had a ten year (100 fold) tech advance on rest of the world- so the personal computing age and its killer apps were globally determined by amercans- mainly the likes of gates and jobs and silicon valley venture cap gates ; its true that berners lee's web as xmas gift in 1989 implied the next 100 fold leap might offer more 360 degree design but then in 1995 amazon redefined the web as 99% for selling instead of sharing life critical knowhow; and that might have left americans to rule the webs waves - except it didnt due to 2 rather good pieces of serendipity
1 enter jack ma- ma's presence as a wizard of community engagement is like the forest gump of his generation; his parents had been street players but china's cultural revolution turned against that form of social media - so they had sort of retired to hangzhou which luckily for jack became designated as a first tourist town open to 1970s world- so from age 11 to 30 jack became both a tour guide and hus generation's most effective english language teacher and penpal friendship connector of china and anywhere tourists connect; by 1995 he also had a translation business- he was hired to make his first trip to usa seattle 1995- there he saw amazon's launch and thought how will ecommerce be designed when it coes to china; in china the extraordinary idea that ended bad communism ( by which i mean stalin's) was when you see a huge innovation test it our rurally first- so jack was determined to become the world's biggest market maker by including village livelihood supply chains- the exact opposite of the pressure by wall street on bezos; its true that jack had 10 years to find partners -see eg jack & yahoo/taiwan & softbank/japan - and play iteratively with concepts before enough digital and real infrastrucrure was in place for there to be digital customers or suppliers- but anyone who researches the dual platforms of taobao and alibaba can see almost every design choice jack made differed from bezos- and being linked in to small enterprise value chains it fits with how the w2ohole of asia rising has happened since 1962- moreover chinese people was desperately lucky- they went straight to mobiles and banks did not pass go by issuing credit cards; so jack leaped ahead with digital cash transfer not designed round putting the population in debt- again ts asia choice which sort of efinance did you want
PART 2 OF VILLAGE WOMEN EMPOWERMENT
starting in 1995; those inspired by billion women nation building out of bangladesh brought both solar charging and mobiles to villages which had never seen electricity grids let alone phones - so even deeper digital solutions to end poverty began to emerge from blending real and virtual networking
at www.abedmooc.com we map 30 hunicorns that partnerships around abed have built as networks too valuable for women empowerment for investors to exit from or politicians to quarrel over; 13 of these were designed in the 25 years before tecg came to the villages; 17 grew exponemtially with tech support