By Petroc Wilton
One of the world’s best-regarded global tech analysts has delivered a new forecast of telecom trends – and forecast more fixed to mobile substitution, the inexorable advance of big data, and the rise of a new “sharing economy.”
Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers analyst Mary Meeker delivered a presentation at Stanford on what has become an annual update on the state of the Web. She said that the global Internet user base had risen by 8% year-on-year to hit 2.4 billion users in 2012, driven particularly by emerging markets. Within that, she highlighted very rapid growth in global mobile traffic, at 13% of total internet traffic by the end of 2012, up from 4% at the end of 2010 and 1% in December 2009.
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| Malaysia has 21st most number of smartphone subscribers globally. Overall global smartphone subscribers grew 42 % to 1.1 billion users but that’s only a measly 17% when taking into account total mobile users |
She noted that, in India, mobile traffic had actually surpassed desktop internet usage in May this year – and tipped other countries to follow suit.
On the mobile device front, Meeker said that while the iPod had changed the media industry and iPhones had taken off even faster, the growth of the iPad had left its ‘siblings’ in the dust – selling three times as many units as the iPhone, for example, in the ten quarters after the launch of the respective devices.
But she added that global Android phone shipments had ramped up more rapidly still, with adoption outstripping the iPhone by a factor of almost six. She also noted that some 29% of US adults now owned a tablet or eReader, up from 2% less than three years ago.
While Meeker noted that smartphone subscriptions had surged 42% year-on-year to hit 1.1 billion globally, that only accounted for around 17% of the total worldwide mobile phone user tally of some five billion. She cast the rapidly ramping uptake so far as just the tip of the iceberg, identifying a “huge upside” for smartphone adoption. Australia stood out as the country with the fifth highest smartphone penetration in the world, trailing only Japan, Korea, Sweden and Canada.
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| We see smartphones everywhere, but mobile phones are estimated to be five times more |
In broader social terms, Meeker outlined the “re-imagination of nearly everything,” driven by the combination of new devices, more connectivity, and fundamental user interface changes. This overarching revision, she said, encompassed everything from computing devices (desktops and notebooks replaced by tablets and smartphones) through to photography, news information flow, connectivity and even operating systems (with WinTel’s decade or more of dominance now shattered by Android and iOS).
And, in line with this, Meeker described the rise of the “sharing economy” and of an “asset-light” generation – eschewing traditionally single-user assets like physical music and film media, cars and even hotel rooms in favour of on-demand subscription- or advertising-funded media, mobile app -driven vehicle sharing and ad-hoc property sharing via Airbnb, Couchsurfing or similar channels.
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| A member of the ‘asset-light’ generation |
But one of the key areas Meeker highlighted for re-imagination was data. “In less than ten years, Facebook garnered massive volunteered (and shared) big data from its billion+ users – to the tune of 300 million images every day,” she said. Meeker added that IDC had tracked a ninefold growth in the amount of global digital information created and shared to almost 2 zettabytes in 2011- and predicted that to quadruple again by 2015.
“[But] if Facebook can create a ‘front-end’ to massive amounts of largely new and personal ‘big data’, in spite of huge initial resistance to ‘sharing’ – think what can come to pass with ‘front-ends’ and connections to most types of data over the next ten years.” – www.commsday.com
