UPDATED 09:50 EDT / FEBRUARY 11 2011

KPCB Mobile Course: The Movers, Shakers and the Will-Be-Forgotten

Analyst Mary Meeker shares the results of her interesting study on mobile trends and predictions globally. The infographic presentation dropped some bombs and startling revelations of what’s hot and what’s not in the mobile realm. It’s true that the relationship between mankind and mobile phones has witnessed some colossal changes in the past twenty or thirty years, and that relationship seems to be getting more serious every day. Meeker’s initiative is very timely with mobile advertising, mobile shipments and arguably anything that has to do with it, seeing a steep spur in the next few months, for device distribution and sales.

First on the list are the platforms that are hitting critical numbers. Cumulative shipments and sales implicate that the iPod is without a doubt a breakthrough device, freeing us of old, bulky music players from who-knows-what-decade. However, the iPhone is the true innovator, and also the perpetrator of “touch” features in the mobile community. The craze continues, as the iPhone broke sales records at Verizon last week, bringing telecom giants clash over exclusivity of distribution. But, the iPad is the golden Apple, standing out amongst its siblings. To say its impact is phenomenal would be an understatement. Competitors have been accruing all their resources to dethrone the iPad, including the giant HP, as it releases the over-hyped TouchPad. Let the tablet war begin!

Apple seemed to be doing well with iTunes as a marketplace, lording over the world of software downloads, until the Android Market was born. Now, iTunes is slowly becoming a story of the olden era, revived with the debut of the Mac App Store. Another promising statistic Meeker highlights pertains to Android, when it hit an astounding reach of global shipments. Today, the combination of smartphone and tablet purchases in Q4 of 2010 strike PC sales big time, tempting the retirement of PCs all together.

But what’s really is fuelling this unparalleled success and exponential growth of the mobile industry?  Meeker’s study clearly stated that social networking is hugely responsible, with social gaming factoring a big chunk of mobile adoption and engagement.  Meeker also provided us with an interesting formula: Mobile Accelerators = sharing + location + “friending” social features, an equation seemingly written by Facebook itself.

With all of these factors and milestones, interdependence and mutualism still define the whole of the mobile industry. The SoLoMo (Social-Local-Mobile) paradigm of John Doerr may just be the next big thing in the tech sphere.


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