Mary Meeker – Updated Internet Trends

Mary Meeker recently came with bullish finding about the internet scene in china. She presented the Updated Internet Trends at the Web2.0 conference(Courtesy :Peter Merholz). Some salient points:

- Global N. America share @ 23% of Internet users in 2005; was 66% in 1995
- S. Korea Broadband penetration of 70%+ - No. 1 in world
- China More Internet users < age of 30 than anywhere
- VoIP minutes in Denmark now exceed landline voice minutes

- The market cap of 5 leading Internet companies (Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo! And Yahoo! Japan) stood at $178B at the NASDAQ peak on 3/10/00 versus $261B now
- There are 1 billion Internet users in the world today but 2 billion mobile phone users – and Asia is ahead of the US in both categories with 36 % versus 23 % of users and 41% versus 11 % respectively
- 4 major computing cycles over past 50 years - Mainframe , Minicomputer, PC, PC Internet (Narrowband)
- In entering 2 most profound cycles ever - PC Internet (Broadband) & Mobile Internet, we see
1) Broadband becoming pervasive
2) Internet-enabled mobile devices becoming pervasive - in effect, becoming
small / functional computers
3) Global technology innovation may be at all time high
- Mobile-PC Becoming New Client-Server Model?
- First ten years (1995-2005) of commercial Internet were a warm up act for what is about to happen & the growth points shall be centered around
- Broadband
- Mobile
- User experience
- Search
- Personalization with more effective targeting
- User-generated content (RSS, blogs, reviews, video, images, audio…)
- Music
- Payments
- Ubiquitious connectivity
- Interactive entertainment
- VoIP & a few others
The marketcap and promise is really awesome - while the upside always appears to be better in any growing movement, it is clearly time for a reality check for closely assessing valuations and investment flows.