Internet Trends Report

Knowing how and where people get information is the best way to know how and where to deliver our messages and services. With that in mind, Kleiner Perkins analyst Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends report is a valuable compilation of research and observation that sheds light in these areas to help us keep up with the constantly changing business/tech landscape. This year’s report, delivered at the recent “All Things Digital” conference, highlights several notable trends.

The move to mobile is in full throttle. Laptop and desktop sales will continue to decline as smartphone and tablets become the devices of choice in the ‘Post PC” era. Apple and Samsung claimed a combined 51% market share of global smartphone unit sales in Q4 2012, making them the dominant players in the field.

• Tablets are being adopted even more quickly than smartphones. Measuring the first 12 quarters after launch, iPads have sold 3-times faster than iPhones. Tablet sales also eclipsed sales of desktops and laptops for Q4 2012, and projections are that annual tablet shipments will surpass laptops in 2013, and total PCs in 2015.
• Mobile Internet traffic is now 15% of total global internet traffic.
• Time spent with print and radio continue to trend downward while TV and Internet remain steady. Mobile, on the other hand, continues to trend upward. Interestingly, the money advertisers spend on print is 4-times greater than the time spent there, while money spent on mobile advertising is one-fourth the time spent, pointing to a $20B opportunity as advertisers catch up.

The entire presentation is 117 slides and provides information on topics including media, global browsing, and wearable tech.

View full report: http://dthin.gs/112zZNG

The Mobile Challenge and Opportunity

Everyone is talking about the shift to mobile devices. We can expect changes in the way business is done and how people get information as smartphones and tablets continue to proliferate. This article points to three strategic problems that businesses must solve as  workforces become more mobile.

Just as the internet fundamentally changed consumer behaviour and the way we do business in the 1990s, the continued rise of mobile is set to be a major disruptive force over the next decade … That is backed up by a recent Gartner survey of 2,000 chief information officers (CIOs) worldwide, with 70% putting mobile top of the list ahead of other trends such as big data, social media and cloud computing as the technology that will disrupt established business models most for the next 10 years.

There are many benefits, mostly economic, that will drive the spread of mobile technology. In our own businesses, it’s a good time to develop strategies to meet our customers and partners when they’re on the go.

Read full article: http://linkd.in/130cV6a

Some Trends to Watch in Digital Media

The twin forces of mobile and social are creating changes across the board for online businesses.  While it can appear overwhelming, there are opportunities if we grasp the trends and develop plans to position us “on the wave.” Here are five interesting trends that will continue to grow and, as a result, change things in ways that cause us to further adapt as the digital world speeds on.

We are all simultaneously creating, being disrupted by and exploiting an incredible array of changes in the way our digital world works. While these shifts can sometimes seem overwhelming because they are proliferating and accelerating so fast, their broad themes can be simplified to help us understand their underlying meaning.

1. Multi-Screen Proliferation
2. Advertising Precision
3. Accelerating Automation
4. Interruptive to Native
5. Static to Real-Time

Read full article: http://linkd.in/18e9HAo

Apps vs Browsers? No Contest. It’s Apps!

When apps — you know, those little applications that run on smartphones and tables? —  first came out a few years ago, a debate arose over which were better, apps or mobile websites, and which consumers would prefer. Developers thought that offering tailored services through a browser was much more desirable, from both cost and usability standpoints, rather than apps, which users had to update constantly, and that developers would have to maintain for several platforms. But consumers, hands down, have chosen apps. There’s something about these little one-trick ponies that are so easy to use that people like.

In this recent report from Flurry, a mobile analytics and advertising platform, it’s clear that apps command the most time spent on mobile devices by a whopping 4-to-1 ratio, and therefore are something consumers want.

Today, the U.S. consumer spends an average of 2 hours and 38 minutes per day on smartphones and tablets. 80% of that time (2 hours and 7 minutes) is spent inside apps and 20% (31 minutes) is spent on the mobile web. Apps (and Facebook) are commanding a meaningful amount of consumers’ time. All mobile browsers combined … control 20% of consumers’ time. Gaming apps remain the largest category of all apps with 32% of time spent. Facebook is second with 18%, and Safari is 3rd with 12% Worth noting is that a lot of people are consuming web content from inside the Facebook app. For example, when a Facebook user clicks on a friend’s link or article, that content is shown inside its web view without launching a native web browser, which keeps the user in the app. So if we consider the proportion of Facebook app usage that is within their web view,  we can assert that Facebook has become the most adopted browser in terms of consumer time spent.

The article covers several more interesting points about apps, but the take-away is, it’s time to think about how we can use apps to best server our customers, and explore what other economies can apps provide. People are using them, so offering them will become a differentiator in the burgeoning mobile world.

Read full article: http://bit.ly/14NBN4j

Hispanics Making Their Mark On the Internet

As our society becomes more multi-cultural reaching diverse groups becomes more important. Some recent research sheds light on a very important community — Hispanics — and reveals that their numbers online are growing, they are active in social media, and over 70% speak English or are bi-lingual.

Online Hispanics are digital mavens and leaders on a variety of social networks. The Hispanic demographic itself, though, has many distinctive characteristics, including preferred language and country of origin, and these differences create varied digital participation levels. An October 2012 survey of US Hispanics by the Pew Hispanic Center found that between 2009 and 2012, the percentage of foreign-born and native-born Hispanics who used the web rose by 18 percentage points and 27 percentage points, respectively. This helped drive up overall Hispanic internet use to 78%, from 64% three years ago … Latino social networking penetration among internet users reached 68% last year. Of these social media users, English was the dominant language for 34% of users, while Spanish was the dominant language for a quarter of users. Another 40% considered themselves bilingual.

Read full article: http://bit.ly/15JJcxi

Understanding Google Plus

If you’re like me you’ve had a hard time figuring out, much less using, Google Plus. Do we really need another social network? Then about a year ago Google changed its privacy policy and began integrating its many properties. Now you’ll often see a Google log-in for services like YouTube, where it didn’t exist before. There’s a method to the madness though, and it turns out Google Plus is destined to be the hub of Google’s services, which in the long run has the potential to be a far more integrated and meaningful approach to social networking than we have seen to this point.

Most people believe [Google Plus] is just another social networking service where all of our friends are supposed to join and share photos, status updates, and messages with each other. But it’s really not that at all.

Sure, there’s a social networking aspect to it, but Google Plus is really Google’s version of Google. It’s the groundwork for a level of search quality difficult to fathom based on what we know today. It’s also the Borg-like hive-queen that connects all the other Google products like YouTube, Google Maps, Images, Offers, Books, and more. And Google is starting to roll these products all up into a big ball of awesome user experience by way of Google Plus, and that snowball is starting to pick up speed and mass.

This articles goes on to show how services like Google Authorship and Google Plus Local Business pages all come into play to make Google Plus membership a must have. I think it’s time to take a second look at Google Plus, and be ready for a migration to come some day soon.

Read full article: http://bit.ly/XeiGt5

LinkedIn Endorsements: Frictionless = Meaningless

LinkedIn seemed to have hit on a great idea: let members endorse other members for their specific abilities with a single click. Problem is, it’s so easy to do that endorsements have become meaningless. Everyday I get endorsements. Then dutifully I go and return the favor by endorsing my endorser. The result is a click-fest that distorts what people really do. Judging by my endorsements, I’m an expert in SEO and web marketing. These are things that I offer to clients, but our strong suits are design, technology, strategy and digital media (code for ‘video’), all of which appear at the bottom of the endorsements list on my profile. And because that list is so prominently displayed, visitors will totally misconstrue my business. Hopefully they’ll read the summary portion of the page, but does anyone read anymore?

There is a way to make endorsement relevant, however. Make them harder to give. The article below suggests a couple of ways to do this:

Right now, endorsing is way too easy. When you go to a connection’s profile page, there’s usually a list of categories in which they can be endorsed. If you click the “Endorse” button, you endorse that person in every category … remove that all-in-one feature and you’ll probably get rid of a lot of spurious or unintended endorsements. Second, when you endorse, give the endorser the opportunity to expand on the thought by citing a specific project they both worked on …

LinkedIn’s endorsements point out a greater problem, however, and that is how companies are, more and more today, creating features that benefit themselves and not  users. A solid endorsement mechanism could provide value if it reflected companies’ and individuals’ true worth. Something like that already exists: recommendations. But they take some effort to write. It’s easier for users to just click an endorsement. Yay! pop the cork and celebrate our brilliant feature. Everyone’s using it. But if there’s no meaning you just end up with lots of data signifying nothing. Unless what really matters is LinkedIn’s user engagement numbers.

Read full article: http://on.mash.to/VkibMW