Sound and Wearable Tech in Mary Meeker's Annual Internet Trends Report

KPCB Internet Trends 2013 from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

I shared the report at the office early yesterday and had several conversations with people about the various sections, even the one about immigration policy -- I happen to be an immigrant, and so was the colleague with whom I ended up discussing the issue.

Technically we are one-percenters (slide 86).

From KPCB's description:

The report reviews the shifting online landscape, which has become more social and content rich, with expanded use of photos, video and audio.
Looking ahead, the report finds early signs of growth for wearable computing devices, like glasses, connected wrist bands and watches - and the emergence of connected cars, drones and other new platforms.

We are starting to see the emergence of sounds, especially in interactive experiences and tools, as well as the smart use of data to first standardize experiences, then personalize them. My take is voice is coming back to phones and tablets (as in text to sound).

The growth of tablets has been astounding, and I can see why.

Although this is not just about iOS devices, the Apple products do take the lion share of the market in at least three important ways:

1. sheer usage
2. customer satisfaction
3. eCommerce transactions

They are the key metrics Apple CEO Tim Cook (see video interview linked below) tracks to understand whether they are shipping the best possible products, and customers are happy.

Many believe we are just scratching the surface on sensor-enabled wearable technologies, and certainly they posses many positive attributes that make it convenient for people to adopt them.

However, they must do and thus be more for people if adoption is to go beyond the tech set. You first have to convince people it's so incredible that they want to wear it, said Cook.

The future of wearable technologies

The topic of the future of wearable technologies came up early on in the one hour plusconversation between Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher and Apple CEO Tim Cook at D11 (remind me not to become a famous tech CEO, she is a formidable interviewer!).

Is the future wearable? Cook's take:

I think so. I wear this. It’s a FuelBand. I think Nike did a great job with this. It’s for a specific area. It’s integrated well with iOS. There are lots of gadgets in this space now.
[As for] the ones that are doing more than one thing, there’s nothing great out there that I’ve seen. There’s nothing that’s going to convince a kid that’s never worn glasses or a band to wear one. So I think there’s lot of things to solve in this space, but it’s an area where it’s ripe for exploration. It’s ripe for us all getting excited about. I think there will be tons of companies playing in this.

I see it as something, as another very key branch of the tree. You think about the post PC era, and we really started talking about this several years ago. I think the iPhone pushed us toward that fast and the tablet accelerated it. I think wearables could be another branch on this.

The whole conversation is worth listening to. They touched upon a number of questions, including recent Apple-related news.

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I'll come back to the Internet Trends report with more thoughts and cross references. For now, I just wanted to highlight what Apple measures in terms of product adoption, and potential direction for the company around wearable technology based upon the answers Cook provided in the interview.

What are your thoughts and reactions?

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2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report

Are you wondering how your peers are using social media?
Wondering if you should focus on Pinterest or podcasting, or put more effort into Facebook?
In our fifth annual social media study, more than 3000 marketers reveal where they focus their social media activities, how much time they invest, what the rewards are and where they’ll plan their future efforts

To understand how marketers are using social media, Social Media Examiner commissioned its fifth annual 2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report.
We set out to uncover the “who, what, where, when and why” of social media marketing with this report.
A significant 3000+ marketers provided valuable insight you won’t find elsewhere.
In this free report, you’ll discover:

• What social platforms marketers will focus on in the future
• The top social media questions marketers want answered
• How much time marketers invest with social media activities
• The top benefits of social media marketing and how time invested affects results
• The most used social media platorms
• Activities social media marketers are outsourcing
• And much more!

If you’re responsible for marketing your business, you’ll want to closely analyze the pages of this free 43-page report and use it to persuade others.

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Social Networking: No Longer a Niche Market in Asia-Pacific

By Joe Nguyen - September 20, 2010

This post was originally published at ClickZ.asia on September 13, 2010.

• Where do 3 out of 4 global Internet users visit during a month?
• What captures 15 percent of total time spent online worldwide?
• What do Asia-Pacific Internet users do online for nearly 3 hours each month?

If you answered social networking, you’re right.
For those people that still consider social networking a niche market, it’s time to wake up and face the data.



In June, 924 million Internet users around the globe visited a social networking site, making it one of the most popular online activities, and it just keeps growing.
In the Asia-Pacific region, half of all Internet users visit a social networking site each month. Although Asia Pacific as a region reports lower social networking usage than other regions (due largely to low broadband penetration in some markets as well as restricted usage in places such as China), usage across the region continues to increase rapidly. Several markets in Asia were some of the most avid users of social networking in the world including the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, which each saw more than 90 percent of their online population social networking during the month.
What’s even more impressive than the sheer volume of traffic to social networks is the amount of time people spend on these sites. Social networks now capture more time than e-mail, news, games and entertainment activities online. Instant messengers are the only online activity more engaging than social networking in the region. In several markets, visitors are spending more than four hours a month on social networking sites including in the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and New Zealand.



But wait, isn’t social networking just for kids and young people? No longer the case. What used to be an activity dominated by the 18-24 year old demographic is now a main activity in the digital lives of users across all age groups. In Singapore and Hong Kong for instance, more than half of social networkers are age 35 and older.
So now you have an idea of just how ‘non-niche’ social networking is, but what does this mean for you as a digital marketer? There are three ways to use social networks:
Word of Mouth Marketing
Social networks – as a matter of course – offer communication. Not just two-way communication between you and your customers, but between your brand and your brand advocates and your potential consumers. There are many case studies about successful word of mouth campaigns. That’s the beauty of social networks; if you create content that has intrinsic value and spurs interest in consumers to forward it on, or to retweet it, or to ‘like it’, it will take off with a life of its own. This is not easy and requires much research and creativity and, more likely than not, some failure.
Social Listening and Reputation Management
It is not enough to just put up a Facebook page or Twitter account. Many companies stop there and don’t dedicate full-time resources to read, update, and reply to all the activity that goes on. Social media engagement does not stop when the campaign stops. Your thousand of followers are still there and they are still commenting. In many cases, telling you what they think of your brand or your marketing campaign. You should listen and engage with these consumers – all the time. Whether it’s communicating with customers via Twitter.com, advertising on Facebook or offering special promotions on social media sites, if you aren’t commanding your brand in the social media realm you are missing opportunities to reach and engage with your audience.
Brand Marketing Campaigns
With over 75 percent reach in most Asia Pacific countries, social networks are now mass market media just like Yahoo, MSN, and other major portals. Branding is about reach (eyeballs) and frequency (the number of times these people are exposed to your message). If you have large cross media campaign to brand a new product or service, the social media is just as effective as the other main media. Just like other sites, it’s important to remember that each social media site offers brands and advertisers access to unique audiences. Many people are on more than one or two social networks for different reasons. Are you looking to reach women age 15-24 from a certain region in Malaysia? Are men age 55+ your key audience? Are you looking to reach social networkers that are also heavy users of online retail sites? Each social networking destination is unique in not only the utility it offers to its users, but also who these users are. Understanding audience characteristics from a demographic and behavioral level is integral to a sophisticated digital strategy.
Social media platforms will continue to evolve and it’s important for brands and advertisers to look to the future. That includes examining: How will social networking evolve in the mobile environment? How will this change PC-social networking usage? What are the synergies that exist between PC and mobile social media usage? What are the differences between PC and mobile social networkers?
Although still a niche market, one can assume mobile social networking won’t be for long.

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Social networks around the world 2010

Social networks around the world 2010

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Twitter: 60 Percent Of Registered Accounts Are From Outside The U.S.

by Leena Rao on Apr 8, 2010


Twitter’s lead engineer for its International team, Matt Sanford, just posted an announcement detailing the microblogging network’s global growth. According to Sanford, over 60% of registered Twitter accounts come from outside the US. The growth in accounts internationally isn’t surprising, considering that we’ve seen Twitter’s worldwide unique visits rise as U.S. traffic plateaus.
Twitter also said that following the availability of its site in Spanish in November, the site saw a 50 percent boost in sign-ups from Spanish speaking countries. It seems that current events and political engagement seem to also precipitate growth for Twitter. Following the earthquake in Chile, signups spiked 1200% and nearly all of those were using Spanish as their language. In Colombia, signups are up 300% after politicians started using the network as a platform to speak to constituents.
India, which is a potentially huge market for Twitter, has seen accounts rise by nearly 100% since the beginning of 2010 because politicians and Bollywood stars have started using the platform to communicate to fans and constituents. Traffic has also grown after a partnership with Bharti Airtel, India’s largest carrier, to ensure that SMS Tweets are sent and received at standard rates.
International growth is also probably attributed to the availability of Twitter in German, Italian, French, which was rolled out late last year. Twitter crowd-sourced much of the work for these translations. Twitter is also available in Japanese.

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Android Equals iPhone in Smartphone Loyalty - Crowd Science

By Sandra Marshall, VP Research - Crowd Science

Earlier this year at Crowd Science, we conducted a study among cell phone and smartphone users, to investigate awareness and brand usage of Android phones. This study also cast a spotlight on the newly introduced Google Nexus One smartphone once it hit the marketplace as the study was ongoing.

In conducting the study, our intent was to see if there were any interesting differences between Android users (if we could capture enough of them to analyse) and iPhone users. In the end we found them to be more similar than different. We came across some interesting findings that pointed to favourable ratings on brand loyalty dimensions among Android and iPhone users, and in the process discovered some less-than-stellar results for the Blackberry brand in satisfaction measures.

Android awareness increases after introduction of Google Nexus One
First, a little bit about what we found out regarding general awareness of the Android operating system….before the Google Nexus One came on the scene, six-in-ten had ever heard of the Android OS, but awareness increased six points to reach 66% after the Google Nexus One was released on January 5th of this year.



Post-launch awareness of the Google Nexus One phone – among those not using Android phones – is 58%. Not unexpectedly, smartphone users demonstrate greater levels of awareness: 75% of Blackberry users, and an even larger proportion of iPhone users (91%), are aware of the Nexus One brand.

Developers more familiar with Android operating system

After being asked if they had ever heard of the Android operating system, respondents were asked how ‘familiar’ they were with it. About one-in-ten of non-Android users say they’re familiar with it, but among those who are developers, this skews higher, with 13% of developers (vs. 6% of non-developers) claiming familiarity with the Android OS. Perhaps this may not be surprising, given the fact that Android is an open source platform that would appeal to developers – as well as the fact that a significantly larger proportion of developers stray from the mainstream in their use of a broader array of smartphone brands, i.e., ‘other’ than Blackberry, iPhone or even Android (35%, vs. 19% of non-developers).

Android users skew younger, lower income
So what kind of people in our study tend to use Android phones? Generally, we found them to skew younger, and accordingly, lower income, than either iPhone or Blackberry users. Business users tend to be more prevalent among those using Blackberry phones, yielding the largest proportion of business-only users among the three brands.




Accordingly, iPhone and Android users are comprised of larger proportions of ‘personal-only’ users. In all cases, however, all three brands of smartphone yield a majority who use their cell phone for both business and personal purposes.

Android and iPhone demonstrate strong brand loyalty
When faced with the hypothetical situation of buying a cell phone tomorrow, Android and iPhone users alike demonstrated a high degree of brand loyalty. Each group was asked how likely they were to buy an iPhone, how likely to buy an Android phone, as well as how likely to buy some ‘other’ type of smartphone, using a 5-point scale of likelihood. The main intent, here, was to see if there might be any migration between Apple’s iPhone and the Android operating system. Instead, what we found was that each group was quite loyal to their own phone with about 9-in-10 saying they’d be likely to buy their own type of phone tomorrow. There was no statistical difference between Android users likely to buy an iPhone tomorrow or vice versa. Blackberry users yield higher proportions (34%) likely to buy an Android tomorrow compared with iPhone users (24%). Interestingly, almost 4-in-10 Blackberry users are likely to buy an iPhone tomorrow.

Satisfaction high among Android and iPhone users, lower among Blackberry usersAs it turns out, a good portion of Android users tend to be satisfied with their phones (61%), as are iPhone users (76%). iPhone users, however, yield a significantly greater proportion of those satisfied with their phone, when compared with Blackberry users (42%).



One might wonder about the ways the phones are used, with Blackberry used more for business purposes – perhaps provided by businesses to their employees, without offering a choice of phone type? Is satisfaction tied to the way the phone is selected, or how it is used? What about the applications that are available to use? Clearly more research might help us answer these and other questions to understand more about the lower level of satisfaction with Blackberry phones – perhaps the subject of one of our upcoming research endeavours.

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What Consumers Look for in New Tech

JANUARY 28, 2010 

Most feel marketers don’t understand their needs

A majority of consumers think technology has made life better in every area except personal relationships, according to the Philips Center for Health and Well-being.

Communication, information and medical treatments topped the areas of their lives that consumers felt were improved by technology. In addition, 64% of respondents said the Internet in particular had made life better, but only 26% said the same of social networking services such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

Consumers’ biggest concern was that technology be built to last, followed by good quality and the best price. Women were more interested than men in tech that could make life easier, save them time and let them express themselves through personalized features.

Just under one-half of consumers reported that technology was easy to use, and a further 32% felt it had a good mix of advanced features and basic functions. In 2004, only 13% of respondents thought technology was easy to use, indicating a dramatic increase in users’ comfort level.

Respondents ages 18 to 24 found technology easiest to deal with, while those ages 55 and up were most likely to say it was too complex to operate. Men also reported more ease of use than women.

Growing comfort with technology has come hand in hand with an increase in respondents who believe tech companies understand their needs (37%). Still, a majority of consumers said companies make what they think will sell, and 39% thought manufacturers simply fell in love with their own ideas.

One-third of respondents reported a substantial disconnect with tech marketers, saying companies had no idea what their lives were like or what they would use. Notably, women were 7 percentage points more likely to say so than men.

Keep up on the latest digital trends. Learn more about an eMarketerTotal Access subscription today.

Check out today’s other article, “Baby Boomers Get Connected with Social Media.”   

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Baby Boomers Get Connected with Social Media

JANUARY 28, 2010 

Living longer and richer lives, they go online to stay in touch

Baby boomers have always been good communicators, as evidenced by their presence at sit-ins, protests, demonstrations and “happenings” in the 1960s. So it was inevitable that boomers would check out social media sites.

“Creating and renewing personal connections online is the biggest draw for these boomers,” said Lisa E. Phillips, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, “Boomers and Social Media.” “About 47% of online boomers maintain a profile on at least one social network, according to several sources. Their contacts include family, friends and co-workers of all ages.”

Burst Media reported that 47.5% of online boomer respondents had a social network profile in June 2009. In September of that year,Deloitte found 46% of boomer respondents said they maintained a social network profile—an important difference from simply creating one and forgetting about it.

Boomers’ social network presence has grown steadily since Deloitte’s 2007 survey, when only 30% said they maintained a profile on a social network. In that period, millennials’ use of social profiles remained fairly steady—and heavily penetrated—at 71% in 2007 and 77% in 2009.

Facebook is the favorite social network for boomers, as bothcomScore and Anderson Analytics data show.

“Boomers expect that technology will help them live longer and better lives and keep them connected to family, friends, co-workers and, eventually, healthcare providers,” said Ms. Phillips. “To fulfill these expectations, boomers are turning to social media, where they keep up their offline social connections and make new ones. Online marketing messages that help them build on their connections—and foster other online relationships—will get their interest.”

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The full report, “Boomers and Social Media,” also answers these key questions:

• How many boomers are on social networks?
• Do boomers use Twitter?
• How do boomers use online video?
• How can marketers reach boomers through social media?

To purchase the report, click here. Total Access subscribers, log in and view the report now.

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Top U.S. Web Brands and Site Usage: December 2009

January 14, 2010

The Nielsen Company today reported December 2009 data for the Top Parent Companies/Divisions and Top Web Brands, as well as average Internet usage.

Top 10 Parent Companies/Divisions for December 2009 (U.S., Home and Work)
Rank	Parent	Unique Audience (000)	Time Per Person (hh:mm:ss)
1	Google	155,683	2:21:53
2	Microsoft	135,876	2:03:01
3	Yahoo!	130,229	2:56:27
4	Facebook	109,905	6:24:17
5	AOL LLC	88,347	2:25:09
6	News Corp. Online	80,152	1:18:15
7	Amazon	74,428	0:35:26
8	InterActiveCorp	71,564	0:15:44
9	eBay	67,979	1:23:31
10	Apple Computer	63,825	1:27:45
Source: The Nielsen Company

Example:  The data indicates that 63.8 million home and work Internet users visited at least one of the Apple Computer-owned sites or launched an Apple Computer-owned application during the month, and each person spent, on average, a total of 1 hour, 27 minutes and 45 seconds at one or more of their sites or applications.

The parent level is defined as a consolidation of multiple domains and URLs owned by a single company or division. The brand level is defined as a consolidation of multiple domains and URLs that has a consistent collection of branded content.

Top 10 Web Brands for December 2009 (U.S., Home and Work)
Rank	Brand	Unique Audience (000)	Time Per Person (hh:mm:ss)
1	Google	146,700	1:40:55
2	Yahoo!	129,032	2:56:35
3	Facebook	109,905	6:24:17
4	MSN/WindowsLive/Bing	108,174	1:56:43
5	YouTube	92,510	1:09:38
6	Microsoft	91,366	0:44:39
7	AOL Media Network	88,347	2:25:09
8	Amazon	66,472	0:33:37
9	Apple	63,825	1:27:45
10	Fox Interactive Media	61,518	1:31:50
Source: The Nielsen Company

Average U.S. Internet Usage, Combined Home & Work, Month of December 2009
Metrics	Dec-09
Sessions/Visits per Person	51
Domains Visited per Person	83
Web Pages per Person	2,614
PC Time per Person	64:09:12
Duration of a Web Page Viewed	0:00:56
Active Digital Media Universe	195,738,178
Current Digital Media Universe Estimate	234,802,000
Source: The Nielsen Company

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China's Internet Users Up 30% YoY to 384M

Written by Matt McDougall  

China added 86 million users in 2009 to reach a total of 384 million Internet users by December 30, up 28.9% from late 2008, according to a report released January 15 by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). China added 120 million mobile Internet users in the year to reach a total of 233 million, representing 60.8% of all Internet users, CNNIC said.

Domestic broadband users reached 346 million by the end of 2009, 76 million more than that of 2008. Rural Internet users accounted for 28.7% of the users, up 26.3% year-on-year, according to the announcement.

Despite a disparity in Internet use between the urban and rural areas, Internet users in rural areas reached 106.8 million by the end of 2009, an increase of 26.3 percent from 2008. The most frequent online practices included listening to music, reading news, and doing searches, said the report. Though China's Internet users are engaged more in recreational activities, they are gradually shifting to consumption related practices, including tourism reservations, online stock playing, and e-banking, which respectively registered increases of 77.9 percent, 67 percent, and 62.3 percent respectively. China added 40 million users in the first six months of 2009 to reach a total of 338 million Internet users by June 30, up 13.4% from late 2008.

Source: CNNIC

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