Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley isn’t just any Internet analyst. She was covering the sector when the brokerage firm was the lead underwriter for Netscape Communications’ initial public offering in 1995, was dubbed the “Queen of the Net” by Barron’s magazine in 1998 and was covering the space in 2004, when Morgan Stanley helped launch the Google IPO. Now a managing director at Morgan Stanley and head of the global technology research team, she has released her latest massively detailed “State of the Internet” report, which she has been putting out periodically since 1995. She presented the report during an event this afternoon at Google, which was streamed live as part of the Events@Google series.

And what does Meeker see in her crystal ball this year? Two overwhelming trends that will affect consumers, the hardware/infrastructure industry and the commercial potential of the web: mobile and social networking. Such a conclusion is hardly earth-shattering news to GigaOM readers, for we have been following these trends over the past year or two, but Meeker puts some pretty large numbers next to those trends, and looks at the shifts that will (or are likely to) take place in related industries such as communications hardware. She also compares where the rest of the developed world is in terms of mobile communications and social networking with Japan. Again, not a radically different approach to the one many tech forecasters take, but Meeker has the weight of some considerable research chops on her side.

The Morgan Stanley analyst says that the world is currently in the midst of the fifth major technology cycle of the past half a century. The previous four were the mainframe era of the 1950s and 60s, the mini-computer era of the 1970s and the desktop Internet era of the 80s. The current cycle is the era of the mobile Internet, she says — predicting that within the next five years “more users will connect to the Internet over mobile devices than desktop PCs.” As she puts it on one of the slides in the report: “Rapid Ramp of Mobile Internet Usage Will be a Boon to Consumers and Some Companies Will Likely Win Big (Potentially Very Big) While Many Will Wonder What Just Happened.”

Meeker says that mobile Internet usage is ramping up substantially faster than desktop Internet usage did, a view she and her team arrived at by comparing the adoption rates of iPhone/iPod touch to that of AOL and Netscape in the early 1990s. According to Meeker, adoption of the Apple devices is taking place more than 11 times faster that of AOL, and several times as fast as that of Netscape. Helping to drive this is 3G technology, which Morgan Stanley says recently hit an “inflection point” by being available to more than 20 percent of the world’s cellular users (although penetration is only 7 percent in Central/South America and 13 percent in Asia/Pacific — excluding Japan, where it’s 96 percent).

But that mobile boom will take its toll on carriers, Meeker says, because mobile Internet use is all about data. The average cell-phone usage pattern is 70 percent voice, while the average iPhone is 45 percent voice. At NTT DoCoMo, data usage accounts for 90 percent of network traffic. The analyst says her team expects mobile data traffic to increase by almost 4,000 percent by 2014, for a cumulative annual growth rate of more than 100 percent. Such numbers will likely strike fear into the hearts of carriers, but joy into the hearts of equipment suppliers and mobile service companies.

One of the implications of mobile access is a growth in ecommerce, says Meeker, featuring things such as location-based services, time-based offers, mobile coupons, push notifications, etc. In China, the success of social network Tencent proves that virtual goods can be a big business, she says — virtual goods sales accounted for $2.2 billion worth of the company’s revenue in 2009 and $24 in annual revenue per user. Online commerce and paid services made up 32 percent of mobile revenue in Japan in 2008, up from just 14 percent in 2000. Meeker’s report suggests that the rest of the world — which is still below the 14 percent-mark — could see much the same trajectory over the next 10 years.

Meeker says that users are more willing to pay for content on mobile devices than they are on desktops for a number of reasons, including:

* Easy-to-Use/Secure Payment Systems — embedded systems like carrier billing and iTunes allow real-time payment

* Small Price Tags -– most content and subscriptions carry sub-$5 price tags

* Walled Gardens Reduce Piracy -– content exists in proprietary environments, difficult to get pirated content onto mobile devices

* Established Store Fronts -– carrier decks and iTunes store allow easy discovery and purchase

* Personalization -– more important on mobiles than desktops

On the social networking side, Meeker’s report notes that social network use is bigger than email in terms of both aggregate numbers of users and time spent, and is still growing rapidly. Social networking passed email in terms of time spent in 2007, hitting about 100 billion minutes/month globally — it’s now twice that — and passed email in terms of raw user numbers in July of 2009, with more than 800 million. Given the rate at which Facebook has been growing, that number is probably now closer to a billion. Meeker attributes social networking’s success to the fact that it’s a “unified communications + multimedia creation tool/repository in your pocket.” And Japan’s experience makes how crucial mobile is to that equation: Mixi, one of the country’s largest social networks, has seen its mobile page views grow to 72 percent of the total from just 17 percent three years ago.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy Flickr user Shapeshift.

Back in November, at our Realtime CrunchUp event, I sat on the geolocation panel with members of Twitter, Foursquare, SimpleGeo, GeoAPI, Hot Potato, and Google. At one point, I raised the question if location was going to be the next battleground between startups large and small, much like social identity plays (Facebook Connect vs. Google Friend Connect) and status updates (Twitter vs. Facebook). All of the panelists indicated that it wouldn’t be, because they could all get along. How sweet. Sadly, I don’t believe them. I believe they might think that right now, because it’s still very early in the game. But it’s still a game, and people are going to play to win.

I’m sure some of them would counter that because location data is fairly standard right now, and moving easily between services, all of them will win. But that’s not true either. While location, as a whole, will win, there will be individual companies that end up ahead of others in the space. More to the point, there will be one or two services that people will go to for their social location data. That’s what we’re moving towards. And the bigger companies are starting to realize it. That’s why today we saw what may be the first maneuver in an upcoming rush to secure the location landscape, with Twitter snatching up Mixer Labs, the team behind GeoAPI. Read the rest of this entry »

Christmas wallpapers may not be everybody’s favorite theme. But many of us would like to be reminded of the merriest time of the year by displaying a nice wallpaper because this season usually brings back happy memories.  I have been posting a lot of Holiday design-related articles to help you come up with your custom holiday graphic artworks. You may use those Photoshop brushes and vector art  and PSD templates to create your own desktop wallpaper. But if you are too busy to make one for your own, then here is a compilation of the best Christmas Wallpapers from around the Web that we have found so far.

A total of 31 Holiday-related wallpapers are included in this post. There are vector graphics of Christmas trees, winter scenes, gifts, snowman, wreaths, stars, balls and other Christmas symbols. So, how about changing yourdesktop wallpaper on a daily basis starting December 1 so you could use up all the 31 gorgeous holiday wallpapers that we assembled in this special post? Have something unique on your desktop wallpaper everyday this  month of December.

Prepare to scroll down your mouse and start feeling the joy of the Holiday Season. Happy holidays, everyone!!! Read the rest of this entry »

Companies have noticed the increased influence of Twitter in our culture, but often lack strategies to help them leverage the platform successfully. Below are 8 ideas that can help:
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Blogging is a growing trend on the Internet today with hundreds of users adding new blogs and fresh content daily.While many use their blogs for personal journals, political opinions or other topics of discussion, one could also look at a blog from a marketing perspective and find benefits for their business. Here I suggest ten reasons to start a custom blog to enhance their online marketing efforts.
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Many people want WordPress to power their site’s root (e.g. http://example.com) but they don’t want all of the WordPress files cluttering up their root directory. WordPress allows you to install the WordPress files to a subdirectory, but have your blog exist in the site root. Read the rest of this entry »

Adsense Alternative – Earn More Revenue With The ClickBank Affiliate Program

Unless your Google Adsense income rocks, chances are you probably earn cents per click. Thanks to the WordPress Affiliate ClickBank Plugin you can now utilize ClickBank, one of the biggest affiliate networks on the Internet. Earn up to 75% commission per sale. ClickBank offers over 12,000 digital products with instant delivery, therefore making ClickBank affiliate ads the very best alternative to Adsense. Read the rest of this entry »