NEW DELHI, October 2- Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is set to visit India, the second biggest market for the social networking giant, to address the first Internet.org summit taking place on Oct 9-10 in the city.
Press Trust of India (PTI) reported that the young billionaire will meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi as well as members of other key ministries.Zuckerberg is the third high profile Chief Executive Officer of a US-based corporation, after Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Micrsoft’s Satya Nadella, to visit India in last few days.
‘Internet.Org’ aims to make Internet access affordable for people across the globe.Focussed on enabling the next five billion people without Internet access to come online, the founding members of the project include Facebook, Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung, said the report.
The partners are collaborating on developing lower-cost, higher-quality smartphones and deploying Internet access in under-served communities.The Internet.org summit will bring together experts, officials and industry leaders to focus on ways to deliver more Internet services for people in languages other than English.
According to the report, Zuckerberg will also meet Modi to talk about how Facebook and the Indian government can collaborate on Internet.org.In July, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg visited India.She had met Modi, who has effectively used social networking during his election campaign and later even in governance.
When Modi met Sandberg, he had suggested the use of Facebook for improving governance, better interaction between people and the government, and to attract more tourists to India, reported PTI.
India is an important market for the social networking company. With over one billion users globally, the company gets over 100 million users from India.According to research firm eMarketer, the number of users in India will touch 108.9 million by the end of the year as compared with 77.8 million in
– BERNAMA
