How many percent of your time is spent online?

Perhaps it is due to the nature of my work, I have become accustomed to welcoming and embracing the Internet as a part of my lifestyle.

Typically, I start and end my day by consuming news and updates on Twitter through my smartphone. A five to ten minutes scroll down the Twitter feed allows me to grasp the gist of “what’s happening” through updates from the influencers I ‘follow’.

Apart from becoming my personal source for news and knowledge consumption, Twitter has also evolved the way I connect with other professionals outside of my network. Prior to establishing offline communication, I find myself start connecting and interacting with professionals with shared interest through the platform. As is the case with other social networking sites, I validate the authenticity of an online identity through the shared connections that I personally know and trust, in addition to the public data accessible on the Internet.

The Internet has brought about change in many ways. The example I used earlier is just the tip of the iceberg.

In the contemporary society, we are no stranger to the Internet. Our three-year-olds are indirectly connected to it through social gaming in apps, so are our granddads and grandmas who familiarise themselves with Facetime and Skype in order to stay connected with the young.

In the latest edition of the annual Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers (KPCB) Internet Trends 2014 report, it examines and reviews the shifting online landscape. Among the highlights include:
Mobile: 30% of 5.2 billion mobile users are now smartphone users; with 25% of global total web usage comes from mobile. On mobile, global mobile app revenue makes up 68% of mobile monetization (totaled at USD 38 billion), with less than USD 15 billion came from advertising.

Desktop versus mobile

Global Internet advertising was USD 116 billion in 2013, with more than USD 100 billion going to desktop advertising. It shows that there is plenty of room for growth in mobile advertising (25% of global total web usage comes from mobile).

Google vs. Facebook vs. Twitter

Google is ahead of Facebook and Twitter when it comes to average revenue per user. Average revenue per Google user is USD 45, the average for a Facebook user is USD 7.24, and the average on Twitter is USD 3.55.

Internet trends: Education

The Internet is accelerating the decline of education startup cost. Online courses from the likes of Khan Academy (10 million monthly unique users), Coursera (7 million users) or Duolingo (25 million users) have seen rapid mass adoption across the globe.

Internet trends: Global Messaging Ecosystem

Whatsapp, WeChat, Line, Kakao Talk, Snapchat are examples of how messaging has evolved. KPCB projects that global over-the-top messaging services will exceed 1 billion users in less than 5 years. These messaging services have also cut into the bottom line of telcos. I have previously expanded on this topic in this article: Free Voice Calls vs. Telcos.

Big Data Trends

As the cost for computational power, digital storage and bandwidth decline, and with the rising of proliferation of devices (wearables, mobile devices, camera, etc), uploadable, shareable and findable real-time data are growing at an exponential rate. We produce more than 1.8 billion photos per day by sharing through platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Flickr, Tumblr, etc. Photo sharing increased 50% in just the first half of 2014.

This report reaffirms that, regardless of the industry you are in, there is a great deal of value for businesses to crack the code for social, mobile and big data. The amazing thing is, on the Internet, everyone starts off on a level playing field, and one may reinvent an industry by riding on the opportunities accessible just a click away.