Mary Meeker shows why mobile is a revolution

Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker published her 2012 Internet Trends Year End Report yesterday and it doesn’t disappoint for detail and insight. Here are just a few highlights:

• The US has 79% penetration by the Internet, highest in the world for percentage but with only the half the users (245 million compared to China’s 513 million) of China and a fraction of the growth (1% compared to China’s 12%).
• Android devices have grown at a much faster rate than iOS (Apple) at 4 times the growth, but had more ground to make up
• Smartphones are just getting started
• Global Mobile traffic is at 10% and rising fast
• Advertising on print and radio are down, TV is flat and Web and Mobile are on the rise (no surprises)
• More Mobile clicks, lower cost per click for Google (not a good sign)
• iTunes Store going strong at over 44 million downloads per day

Meeker is describing a mobile revolution that is still small in the U.S. and has enormous potential both here and across the rest of the world. This is an enormous opportunity for startups and established companies that move quickly and risk for anyone who ignores it.

Reimagination

The second half of Meeker’s presentation is about the reimagination of so many consumer and business products and services that you’ll simply need to see the report. It gets a big political around slide 96 but makes a couple of good points about what we can do on a personal level:

• Engage in politics
• Understand key issues
• Do what you can to innovate
• Create jobs & improve education

Our takeaways

While the report is an update of her report from earlier this year, it validates the numbers that have been coming for a while now…Mobile is on a march to disrupt the way we live and two U.S.-based companies ‘own’ the operating systems that are dominating, Apple and Google. As Meeker says, the Internet is still in Spring Training but the season is starting soon.