A new Mary Meeker glimpse of the future

Bryan Alexander 2013-06-03

Mary Meeker’s technology trends presentations are always worth examining, and her new one, KPCB Internet Trends 2013, is no exception.

I’d like to draw out several key points, based on my current work on higher education:

  1. TV-watching is huge for Americans (slide 5).  We spend more time on it than on print, radio, the internet, and mobile devices.  It takes up almost half of our media experience.  Interestingly, this isn’t true in China, where mobile devices lead media use (slide 68).  How can colleges and universities apply this information?  Perhaps understanding tv culture more deeply is a way to grapple with different generations of students and staff.  And school reaching out to China need to focus on mobile.
  2. Android’s worldwide share of mobile has ballooned, significantly outpacing iOS’s, and far beyond others (Microsoft, RIM, Symbian look tiny) (slide 7).  Samsung is the world’s leading smartphone maker in terms of market share (slide 32). Perhaps educators should shift development resources towards Android platforms.  Given Google’s focus on the Web, schools should also remember to publish content there.
  3. Facebook owns photo sharing (slide 14).  Flickr and Snapchat barely make an appearance.  Meeker doesn’t notice Google/Picasa.  Maybe this is a major venue for teaching visual literacy, not to mention sharing campus visual documents.
  4. Podcasting is weirdly invisible despite discussions of audio (slides 21-22).  We need to spend more effort educating people about this vibrant form.
  5. While many Americans (especially educators) fret about sharing information online, please know that we don’t do a lot of this, as seen in the global context (slide 28):How nations share information online
  6. The proportion of internet users who rely on mobile devices to get online keeps growing (slide 32).  Indeed, Chinese users prefer phones to PCs for internet access (slide 33), offering one glimpse of the future.  Campuses need to think hard about mobile strategies; see point 2, above.
  7. We’re seeing rapid development in mobile, connected devices  beyond laptops and phones (slides 51ff).
  8. Meeker offers a disruption to education argument (slides 98-101), seeing online education as both growing and democratizing.

Once again, a very useful stack.   What did you take away from it?