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Mary Meeker is arguably one of the famed investors who is highly respected for internet industry research and predictions. The presentation itself is quite exhaustive and takes more than couple of hours to digest and interpret for best use. But, if you are in rush of things and want to understand what it unravels and how we may get impacted here are few highlights I have collected which might intrigue you to dive deep into the presentation or inspire you for some soul searching.
1. Smartphone growth is slowing down and saturating – this just means that we will experience more of handset switch than new adoption. Also note the mobile app fatigue setting combined with growth of voice/chatbots can change the devices/interface required to interact.
2. 2016 was the inflection point where global internet ads overtook the global tv ads which was result growing engagement time of users with mobiles than with television. Internet advertisements is becoming all powerful being hyper contextual with geo targeting thereby benefitting the user and advertiser. For instance, imagine you are in downtown and you just finished a meeting you had in your calendar and it is lunch time. You pull out your smartphone to look at the next schedule, your personal assistant comes up reminds you that it is lunch time and you have about 45 mins to grab food from your favorite food from your nearby restaurant before the next meeting. You order the food for pick-up through your assistant.
3. Voice and Picture search will be the new future replacing text search. This would mean advertisers must think about innovative ways to reach their targets and win their attention.
4. As livestreaming is picking up and individuals are becoming broadcasters with their own fanbase, advertisers can become creative to reach their audience. Internet based Entertainment channels are using interesting ways to intersperse ads as integral part of content (already happening in India) or in US where gaming is big and it will continue to grow with Augmented Reality it will be neat to bring in advertisements more interactively.
5. Emergence of Subscription stores & Cross channel approach – It is interesting to see how Amazon kind of eCommerce giant is becoming a single stop shop to offer every product/service under earth. Also, it is going from 100% online presence to launch retail formats for books & groceries while Walmart is investing heavily to accelerate its digital presence.
6. Zuckerberg’s law is replacing Moore’s law i.e. shared economy is replacing owned economy – such as games where you are not interested in owning consoles playing all by yourself or close friends inside a room to playing on internet with players sitting across the globe. It is also shifting powers at rapid rate where large shared intelligent computing power (Cloud +AI) is available to smaller organizations to an era where large organizations had non-thinking small computer power.
7. Gamification is everything – machine learning combined with gaming mechanics is helping the touch generation (post millennials) to learn, develop life skills and prepare for human-machine era. Gamification is helping adults to improve their personal health (fitbit challenges etc.), motivate and make them perform better in workplace (CRM products use gamification in a big way to for managing sales teams)
8. China & India – the consumers and largest benefactors of internet space. Disruption in transportation business of two comparable demographics such as car & bike sharing has potential to solve lot of last mile challenges and drive new economy. They also have been quick to adopt and grow the mobile payment gateway which fosters and funds the internet growth further.