ASIA is the best laboratory in the world to experiment and predict what the entire Internet will look like five years from now.

Asia has the fastest Internet growth in the world, from the largest population base. But underneath all this change is a very simple force. It's not the technology, the new platforms or the social networks. It's the people. The people of Asia started doing different things with mobile devices than people were doing in the West and also expecting different things. Right now, Asia is showing the rest of the world what the Internet can really be.

To understand the scope of this change, let me go back and give you a quick view of the last two years. In 2010, mobile traffic to Google was growing at the same pace that desktop traffic had been growing in the early days of the company. This was a signal that something big was happening.

In 2011, South Korea became the first country in the world where mobile views of YouTube exceeded desktop views. In 2012, Japan became the second country to cross that frontier. That same switch in online video is coming to China. The percentage of China's Internet users who watched or downloaded videos was 32 percent at the end of 2012, a huge rise compared to the 9.5 percent we saw in 2011. In 2012, India's entire mobile traffic exceeded desktop traffic. Desktop is just not going to matter in India.

And that pace has continued.

At the 2012 Olympics, when Paul McCartney sang "Hey Jude," searches for Paul McCartney on tablets and mobiles spiked massively, while desktops had a much smaller spike. People were obviously watching the Olympics on the big screen and looking up the song on another device. This was as true in Japan as it was in London. In fact, 55 percent of all Japan's searches in the first two days of the London Olympics were done on mobile devices.

You can see that now in China, as well. The number of users in China who did mobile searches amounted to 291 million people by the end of 2012. We expect 500 million people in emerging markets to join the Internet between now and 2015. They will drive this transformation even faster, since they won't ever have had the desktop-based habits that we've developed over the past 10 years. They're rebuilding the Internet from an entirely different foundation.

Real misunderstanding

Marketers, businesses and governments have to embrace just as fast, and this is a challenge. More than half of the big businesses in Asia only have a desktop site, which can be confusing or hard to read on a mobile device. And many other businesses have split their Internet strategy into two - one for mobile, one for desktop. Both tactics show a real misunderstanding of why people use these devices in the first place.

In Asia, we can't focus on devices to get a strategy to reach this population. We need to focus on the bigger picture by looking at what people are doing.

Let's compare China and India. Nielsen thinks that about two-thirds of mobile Internet users in China have a smartphone. In India, 80 percent of people have feature phones, mostly because of the cost of smartphones. That's if you look at devices.

If you look at users, you see a lot more similarities than differences. About 35 percent of smartphone users in the US have purchased something on their phone. In China and India, more than half of smartphone users have bought something on their phone. The Internet is evolving and the evolution means that the most important feature of any device - whether it's the iPhone or Google Glass - is its connection to the cloud.

I travel a lot around Asia, and I'm frequently surprised and delighted to turn on my phone and find that Google Now has told me, without my asking, all the things a rushed business traveler never bothers to find out before setting out.

It knows where I usually live and that I'm not in that country. So it gives me a currency conversion, the time back home, the translation for hello in the local language, restaurants nearby and, thanks to a confirmation email from the hotel, directions to the place I'm staying for the night.

This seems basic enough, but it wasn't possible five years ago. Computing used to make the rest of the world disappear as we hunched over one screen. Now we're taking computing out into the world and using it to make moments in our lives easier and more convenient.

A colleague of mine from Tokyo, who used to be a travel writer for Lonely Planet, was showing me a photo of what he packed for one trip to Central America five years ago. As you look across the guidebooks, phrasebooks, books to read, maps, cameras, memory cards, GPS devices, compasses and flashlights, you realize something. In just five years, you can replace all of them with a smartphone.

Our travel experiences are becoming so much richer. The same is becoming true for education.

The next time you're on the bus, take a look at what is on people's screens. Almost everyone has a screen on the bus these days. Sometimes games. Sometimes news. Sometimes chat. A colleague told me that on his bus in Singapore the other week, he sat next to a guy watching a lecture on how to code python for the entire 40-minute ride.

Multiscreen strategy

So, what will the future look like?

We think all these screens will actually add up to an experience that is much more human and more physical than our device-centric world today. It's not so easy for organizations to adjust. I know many have a separate Internet strategy group. And many of those groups have a separate mobile-Internet strategy group. The truth today is that we can't use devices to summarize people or situations. A person with a smartphone, TV and a tablet is one person, not three.

People are connecting every part of their lives to every other part of their lives. They want this to be seamless. Our researches in India found that people under 30 changed devices more than 20 times a day. That's the future.

If you are a marketer today, you are a multiscreen marketer. If you're a business of any kind, you have to reach your customers across all the screens that people are using. The challenge is not to bury all of this potential under complexity, which is what will happen if we focus on devices and try to build a new strategy each time there's a new one.

The Asian opportunity lies in what is motivating people to buy so many devices and then switch between them. They expect the web to enrich their lives. So we should look for those moments when we can do just that.

You need to have a coherent, continuous message across all screens. But perhaps more than anything, you need to invest early. Users are already way ahead of your business. You need to move - and now!

The opinions expressed here are his own.