Mary Meeker, former analyst of Morgan Stanley and current partner at Kleiner Perkins, has released her Internet Trends 2014 report at the Code Conference.
Meeker's 2014 report shows optimism about the future of the Internet as mobile users continue to drive growth in the industry.
One of the main highlights of the report is that entrepreneurs and investors have so much to look forward to, as mobile Internet usage growth is outpacing traditional Internet usage growth.
In the report [PDF], Meeker shows that mobile data traffic increased by 81 percent and mobile Internet usage increased 25 percent compared to last year. However, traditional Internet usage growth decreased to less than 10 percent per year.
The huge increase in mobile data traffic is partly driven by increased video views. As per Ooyala, a video platform, the part of mobile on videos viewed online is now at 22 percent, which is double than what it was last year.
Global smartphone penetration increased to 22 percent, which is far above the percentage of laptop penetration at 11 percent, desktop penetration at 10 percent and tablet penetration at 6 percent.
In addition, users from developing nations in Asia and Africa completely bypassed the PC and laptop era, moving straight to using smartphones. This is supported by the decreasing costs of technology overall, though the costs of data are still high.
The report commends China as a global leader in the development of mobile commerce. WeChat users, which number 400 million, can access banking services, restaurant reservations and grocery purchases, among other things. In addition, because of its integration with WeChat, Didi, a Chinese taxi app, books 5 million rides per day.
Meeker also says that the biggest re-imagination of the Internet is the movement of mobile devices to using various sensors that allow the user to pass on valuable information to technology companies. Companies can then use this information to understand the users, allowing them to create products and processes depending on user need.
She cautions about the individual privacy rights that such data mining could violate along with security attacks that are sure to intensify.
Meeker also notes the development of apps to move away from being multi-purpose app to being single-purpose apps, such as Messenger by Facebook and Vine by Twitter.
Users are also becoming more selective with the content that they share, sharing more content to a smaller group of people rather than sharing a little bit less content to a bigger group of people.
Meeker discussed these points, along with many others, in a 164-slide presentation.
