Ian Vernon, founder of PeN

My name is Ian Vernon. Thank you, everyone. I'm from the founder of PeN. PeN is my 7th startup. I'm actually invited here, I think, because of my previous startup, which was more of a success than this one. The last one was acquired by a Chinese company, publicly-stud called Dingli, and it managed to have 400 million users last year. So now we're going to talk to you about PeN and why there's a need for a social network that still works when internet is down. Today, only 46% of the world is actually connected to the internet. That's 7.4 billion people today. 3.4 billion have internet connection. However, there are 99% of us humans that have mobile phones. I think everyone in this room could agree with me that you all have mobile phones, right? Talking about internet, out of those 47% or 99% of humans having a mobile phone, 47% of us are connected to the mobile broadband. But look at the difference. There's 1% difference between all humans having connected to the internet, which is only 46%. In terms of internet usage, we see that most of the internet usage are actually down in the Western Hemisphere, from Sweden all the way to the United States. But that's only 30% of the world's population. 60% of people on earth are still in Asia. However, there are 1 billion people connected to social media in Asia. And 30% of the world, talking about social network, 30% of the world are actually connected in the social media, and out of that, 94% are on mobile. So I think most of you, most of us here, connect to social media or social networks mostly using our mobile. Is there still anyone who doesn't use their mobile to connect to social network? No one? Anyway, that answers the question that most of the social media connections that we have are in the Western Hemisphere. So we're ignoring something. We're ignoring that the people that are connected to social networks are mostly in the West, led by all of us that use Facebook. There's today 1.6 billion people using Facebook, and 75% on mobile, but again, mostly in the world. Now, what I'm driving here is there is actual problem. It's a problem connecting every person on the planet to the internet or to any communications device. That's a problem where today we have about 4 billion people that have never tried the internet. How do you onboard them? And when we have 4G and 5G, at least the Western Hemisphere, we have fifth generation technology coming in. In the Eastern Hemisphere, we have fourth generation technology coming in. How do we onboard all these people? Right. So to solve that, we think the best answer is a social network that can actually serve 7 billion people, works offline. When the internet stops working, when Facebook stops working, when WhatsApp stops working, we need something that still works offline, that would provide free calls and SMSs. Why free calls and SMSs? 4 billion people in the world today don't have access to the internet, but they know how to call. They know how to send SMSs. It is still relevant. More importantly, it could provide help when there's personal emergencies. Any one of you reading the news about India? Nobody? Okay. India, it was ruled by the government by next year. All devices sold in India will have to have an emergency button, personal emergencies. It should engage community members and enable to create pre-shops. Our main problem today, each am commerce platform, we've seen a lot, they're quite expensive, and we need somewhere in the Eastern world to be able to create that and discover friends and places. Well, I'm going to talk to you about Penn and what we do and how we do it. Penn is first and foremost a social network. We have chats that disappear. Who doesn't? Snapchat has that. More importantly, we provide free SMSs and free phone calls. You can use our social network to locate your friends, see where they are, ensure personal safety and security, visit places, discover places even in your own cities, and more importantly, to shop. We do everything of this. All of this we provide for free to our users. And it is available anytime, anywhere, even when offline. So I'm going to talk to you about how we do that. I'm going to try to make it shorter because we don't have a lot of time, but later on if you have questions about the technology, please feel free to approach me. So today when you have internet connections, all your posts, your calls, your chats, your shares, your shopping, all work with the internet. You're online. But when you don't have internet connection anymore, we still deliver the voice and the data. We're similar to how iOS iMessage works. Anybody using iPhone? Right? So you know how iMessage works. So we extend that. Instead of only delivering your post, your text, your messages as an SMS in the background, we also pass the phone calls going through the TDM network. So it's carried by your network provider. The same thing we do when you have personal emergency. We actually send the GPS information or, as the guys in Google would like to say, the location services through the SMS, not through IP. And that becomes available if you have our application. It's shown in a very nice interface. If you don't, then you get an SMS and an access to the map. Same way as when we locate friends. But more importantly in what we do, your streaming videos, your sharing data still becomes available when you're offline. When there's no internet connection, when you don't have any connection at all. So in what we do, we create a local cloud, as we call it. It's actually a mesh network being generated from your devices. Your device has Bluetooth, has Wi-Fi, has mobile connection. We use all this to create a mesh network between several devices that allows you to stream data from one device to another. Now at some point on that chain, there's someone with an internet connection. Then we would be able to upload that data using that internet connection. So it becomes available to those who are not part of the chain. We provide this for free in our users today. But how do we make it for free? Quite simple. One, we have enough purchases. Of course, we make money out of that transaction fees on our M-commerce platform. But more importantly, advertising in social searches the same way as Facebook and Google monetize. Does it work? Does anybody use it? Well, we launched last week in Hong Kong during the web summit. There were 50,000 users that signed up in the first week. This is an old map that was from three, four days ago. There were 130 countries that signed up. Today there's about 149 countries, users in 149 countries within pen. You can actually look into Google Play. You can download it. You can try it. I'm going to skip the demo because that would take some time. But I do encourage you to please download and try. We are a completely different social network. We transcend instant messaging and social network through service fees and advertising. More importantly, we are always reachable. When you use our social network, you never are nonreachable. You're always available even when you're offline. No internet connection. We provide free phone calls to especially in the Eastern Hemisphere where phone calls are costing a dollar. In Sweden they're almost for free, right? But if you are in Bangladesh or you are somewhere in Saudi Arabia, that is a dollar per minute. And we provide those free covered by advertising. Of course, it's easy to use. We enable every mom and pops out there to create their online stores for free. We don't charge creating online stores like Shopify would do. We actually only charge the transaction fees when we clear the transaction for that online store. More importantly, we allow reaching huge communities. Next week we will launch a community with 6.5 million teachers. Our download rate will change by then, hopefully. But this is a limitation in actual social media today. If you look at WhatsApp, there's only 200 members in the group chat. And if you look at Telegram, the most used app in the Eastern Hemisphere, there are only 5,000 users in one group. And we allow unlimited group numbers. More importantly, we are a product that works very similar to Facebook, to Skype, and to Foursquare rolled into one single platform. Let me go back to that. We're quite ambitious. By 2020 we expect to be about 217, more than 200 million users. $15 billion in revenue. I will justify that to you later on. Like I said, we build a company with 400 million users in three years, but mostly in China. Anyway, I welcome your questions. I'm going to skip the video demo. But if you have any questions, please feel free.