Here is some additional information if you still need to convince colleagues, superiors that ‘online’ should be at the top of the agenda, here’s some (random) ammunition to silence if not enthuse them once and for all:
• 1.46 billion people are now online (source: Internet World Stats).
• Total IP traffic grew 57 percent during 2007, and was estimated to grow by 62 percent in 2008.(Source: Trendwatching).
• IP traffic will nearly double every two years through 2012. Total IP traffic will increase by a factor of six from 2007 to 2012, reaching half a zettabyte.
• Video is now approximately one-quarter of all consumer internet traffic.
• Internet video will account for nearly 50 percent of all consumer internet traffic in 2012.
• Mobile data traffic will double each year from now through 2012 (source: Cisco, much more at www.tinyurl.com/mobiledata).
• 3 billion people have cell phones (source: GSM association).
• Flickr.com has 10 billion photos uploaded to the site and more than 30 million new photos uploaded daily.
• YouTube has 329 million users, Facebook has 121 million active users, Skype has 370 million and PayPal has 65 million.
• Microsoft Xbox Live has 12 million members (source: Morgan Stanley). And are reporting the addition of a Facebook and Twitter connection.
• In its first three months (July-Oct 2008), Apple’s App Store had handled 200 million downloads.
And so on.
If you have any doubts that The Mobile Tipping Point is here continue reading.
For years and years, futurists, cyber-gurus, trend watchers and other overly-optimistic gadget-fetishists have been predicting the glorious coming of the mobile web. Never mind that the lack of wireless broadband combined with archaic and money-grabbing mobile operators turned that dream into a sustained mobile nightmare.
But. The clouds are parting. 3G and 4G are coming to the rescue, and of course (dare we say it) the iPhone! These numbers suggest THE MOBILE TIPPING POINT is here:
• The number of cellular mobile broadband subscribers will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 104 percent between 2007 and 2011 (source: Infonetics Research).
Basically, owners of iPhones and smart phones and tablets and nano-notebooks are embracing an improved online-on-the-go experience.
But please forget proprietary portals or paying by the byte: all consumers ever wanted to do on-the-go was whatever they were already doing on clunky computers, and then some. Read: diving into the online world fast and without limits, on whatever gadget offers the best marriage of size, apps and portability. With some serious GPS action thrown in, too.
Which means that cyberspace as we know it (read: a wondrous world of control and make-believe restricted to desktops at home or in poorly-lit offices, and laptops that don’t venture too far from patchy hotspots) is about to vanish, and will be replaced by something that is everywhere, enabling consumers if not enticing them to actually venture out into the—you guessed it—real world.
Though when that happens, what will constitute the real world will be up for debate. Anyway. Get ready for a generation that is (finally) always online while offline. And vice versa.
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