Trends Shaping the Internet in 2015

This must have been one HECK of a presentation. Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), a large venture capital firm, presented 196 slides at the 2015 Code Conference detailing cutting edge trends that will shape the Internet in 2015. A solid majority of the slides in her “Internet Trends 2015” are fascinating and surprising. Even if they’re not directly applicable to your day-to-day work, they will help you visualize and contextualize the Internet of the near future. Take these examples:

• Additional online access points translate into additional time spent online. The hours per day that Americans spend on desktops/laptops hasn’t changed since 2008 (about 2.3 hours per day), despite a huge growth in hours per day on mobile devices (from .3 hours in 2008 to 2.8 hours in 2015YTD). [Slide 14]
• Look out for more mobile advertising. Internet and mobile usage is equal, but ad spending on the Internet is 3x that spent on mobile. As the report states, there is a $25B+ opportunity for mobile advertising in the U.S. [Slide 16]
• Messaging apps are the top global apps in terms of both usage and sessions. [Slide 47] The top messaging apps are building out their platforms to offer services beyond IM. They may evolve into central communication hubs, perhaps replacing email. [Slide 53]
• 12-24 year olds continue to set trends in the marketplace. And “visual stuff,” like Instagram [Slide 68] and smartphone cameras [Slide 70] are a huge interest with that group.

There’s more in the presentation (on drones, cyber attacks, America’s evolving workplace, millennials in the workforce, online commerce, and China and India as the largest growth Internet markets, to name a few) but getting through is a bit of a marathon. Bring an energy bar. I can’t imagine how Meeker survived presenting it. She probably had assistants splashing her with little paper cups of Gatorade or something. The point of collating all of these trends, from Meeker’s perspective, is to help her venture capital firm decide which companies to invest in. As such, one might be suspicious about some of the specific services and companies she cites as transformative. Are they a part of the KPCB “family?” Even if they are, the capital investment made implies a certain level of confidence that those companies will indeed play a role in creating the near-future Internet. What do the trends covered here mean for what library users will expect out of online service in 2015 and beyond?