Mary Meeker’s Wisdom, 2010 Edition

Every year at Web 2.0, Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker unveils her Internet Trends. I will not rattle down the entire list (the briefest of brief summaries over here at TechCrunch) but one thing that is really noteworthy as compared to last year’s edition (which I briefly covered here) is that mobile takes centre stage: in 2009, she started covering mobile in earnest on pages 28 et seq. This year, it is topic # 2 (but even topic #1 [Globality] has more than 50% mobile in it).

Now, the learned readers of this blog have (I suspect) known this all along but it is good to see that one of the more influential analysts of the web at large “decrees” this on the Web 2.0 (sic!) stage, too.

And it is of course blindingly obvious: large parts of the world leapfrog the desktop Internet simply because they do not have access to desktops. The access instrument of choice is mobile. And these parts of the world just happen to be the ones where most of the growth occurs.

Incidentally, Meeker’s third point was social ecosystems. And there as well, we are seeing the huge impact of mobile. If you take Tencent, China’s IM/Social Networking solution of choice with a whopping 637m active IM users, and compare that with the Chinese Internet users (384m), we have a delta of 250m people who are accessing this via mobile. Just like that… Again, it is not that surprising: after all, mobile is – by design – the most personal digital medium we have ever had and when this coincides (as it does) with it being the prime access for digital content bar none, you create a very powerful mix indeed. And this will not be constrained to the somewhat crude experiences of feature phone WAP browsers either: in 2011, we will see smartphone penetration breezing past the PC size (desktop and laptops alike). It is mobile, mobile, mobile!

If you want to have a read through the presentation, you find it here.

Conference: Social Gaming Summit, London

Sometimes, the good things come quickly and without much fanfare. Tomorrow (that’s 11 November), the Social Gaming Summit will open its doors at the Stamford Bridge home of Chelsea Football Club in London. And  I will talk about how to bring the social element into the mobile sphere (and, yes, regular readers of this blog will be rather familiar with my stance on this).

So if you fancy a trip to Fulham to hear from the social games gurus from Playfish, Facebook, Playdom, RockYou, PopCap, etc, etc, please come along (a full speaker list is here). It is a tremendous line-up and should be tons of fun!

The conference programme is here and you can sign up here.

Conference: Games Convention Online, Leipzig

Yes, yes, do we remember the good old days in Leipzig? Yes, we do. Since the German games industry did however decide that the travel connections weren’t up to scratch, they moved on to Cologne (in August) but did this bother the good folks in Leipzig? No, it didn’t. Not in the least. Instead they set up their very own Games Convention (with the added “Online” bit) and stage a very successful show in spite of all the adversaries.

I will be giving a talk on “Gaming with the World” (yes, I know, it sounds a bit grand) but there is also (!?) a lot of other good stuff to look forward to, i.e. valuable insights from leading players, such as:

  • Mindmatics
  • Nokia
  • Bigpoint (they of 100m+ online gamers)
  • VZNetzwerke (who successfully took on Facebook)
  • Playdom
  • Digital Chocolate
  • and many, many, many more.

So make your way to Leipzig, one of the prettiest German cities and home to Johann Sebastian Bach (who was cantor at St Thomas) and host to some venues of Goethe’s famous Faust (Auerbachs Keller). It is well worth it. Bach thought so, Goethe thought so. So who are you to doubt them? ;-) Register here and be quick…

I hope to see you there!