The Rest of the World Is Better at Making Money Off the Internet

"What may seem futuristic to us may merely feel new and practical to others."

That's the gist of a new slideshare presentation created by the UK mobile business design consultancy yiibu, which was spotted yesterday by Kottke. It's an interesting little presentation on how people, mainly in Asia, are leveraging the social web to run businesses and boost the economy, especially in remote areas unserved by brick-and-mortar retail.

As Mousse Magazine reported last year, everyone from sheep herders to grandmothers is selling something on Instagram, while merchants make appointments with customers via WhatsApp. The American University of Kuwait even held an "Insta-business expo."

In Thailand, Facebook is the preferred commerce platform, with over 10,000 informal, ad hoc Facebook businesses. In Kenya, India, and the Philippines, virtual banks and mobile transactions are commonplace.

China, of course, is all about mobile, and e-commerce marketplaces are huge there, dominated by Alibaba's Tmall for brands and Taobao for consumer-to-consumer sales. Running a Taobao shop is so popular it's considered "a national pastime," like a hobby, the presentation explains.

There are more than a million such shops in the massive county's rural areas, dubbed "Taobao villages," wrote the Economist. One village in Guangdong province is opening a "Taobao university" to teach people how to sell things online.

The Chinese social media site YY.com sells online services like entertainment and lessons, sort of like Google Hangouts is starting to do, only it's already got 300 million users, its own virtual currency, and top karaoke singers can make $20,000 a month advertising their skills on the site.

In Korea, digital grocery stores are embedded on subway platforms, the slideshow explains. Customers just scan a QR code on the digital image of the product they want with their smartphone and it's delivered to their house. And in Africa, that delivery could very well happen by drone.

The whole thing is worth a read, via yiibu on Slideshare: