CAPE TOWN, South Africa -- Gaining market share in Africa is a very different kettle of fish. Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu's red envelope rivalry may remain limited to China for now, but a battle for access to Africa's burgeoning mobile Internet market could be on the horizon, too.

The government's refusal to loosen the reins of control and welcome both bottom-up entrepreneurialism and foreign investment in "sensitive" areas prevents service industries from flourishing.

The 2015 Global Thought Leaders Index, a "collective intelligence" analysis that maps the global conversation on the Internet and ranks its most influential voices, has just been released by The WorldPost and the Zurich-based Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute. For the first time, the annual index measures not only the globally-dominant English language infosphere, but also the other main language infospheres of Spanish and Chinese, as well as German. Altogether we rank the nearly 400 people who are most often mentioned and discussed online, ranging in the global index from Pope Francis, who ranks #1, to Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk at #4, Edward Snowden at #5 and cellist Yo-Yo Ma at #9.