Internet Report 2016

The "Queen of the Internet" Mary Meeker's Internet Trends report released today at the 2016 General Assembly in the US.

Below is the quick summary of the report with the highlights:

The number of Internet users worldwide exceeded 3 billion, an increase of 9 percent over the previous year, the global Internet penetration rate reached 42%. 

India's Internet users reached 277 million, up 40% over last year which makes India the second largest Internet market, after China.

The global smart phone users increased by 21% over the previous year, an increase of 31 percent last year, the growth rate slowed down; after a 5-year high growth in 2015 global smart phone shipments up 10%, up 28% last year.

Smartphone users in Asia Pacific grew 23% last year up 35%.

Global mobile phone operating system share, iOS share in 2015 was 16%, Android share reached 81%.

To benefit from the rapid growth of mobile advertising (66%), 2015 US online advertising grew by 20% last year to 16% in 2015 increased by only 5% of the desktop ads.

Google and Facebook, the two companies together to eat 76 percent of the US online advertising market.

Desktop ad blocking users has reached 220 million mobile ad blocker users reached 420 million, mainly concentrated in China, India and Indonesia.

E-commerce share of the US retail distribution channels, from less than 2% in 2000, increased to more than 10% in 2015, reached more than $ 340 billion.

Message type applications continue its rapid growth, industry leaders including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat.

Voice is becoming a computing interface is the most efficient form of computer input, the machine accuracy of the speech recognition from about 70% in 2010, increased to about 90% by 2016.

IPhone sales in 2015 may have reached its peak, the next Amazon Echo equipment sales will begin to take off?

China Internet Report:

From more than one measure, China has become the market leader in the Internet, the number of Chinese Internet users reached 668 million.

Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu three companies are China's mobile Internet market leader, they accounted for 71% of Chinese users of mobile consumer long time.

2015, China's online advertising market has more than television advertising.

2016, There were 31% of the micro-channel micro-channel shopping users, while in 2015 the figure was 15%.

Global Internet market leader: Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Tencent, Alibaba and other companies, flush with cash.

What do you think about this report & is this what you expect to be coming by?

Link to the complete video

12 Social Media listening tools

Social Media is used by brands for various purposes like:

      ·         Brand Building

      ·         CRM

      ·         ORM (Online Reputation Management)

      ·         Lead Generation

      ·         Sales

      ·         Traffic Generation

      ·         Internal Communication

      ·         Fun Raising

The major activity in social media that marketers need to do is listen to what, when, where are consumers talking about their respective brands. Data on web is scattered all around, thus to make our life's more easy we have some free, premium & paid Social Media listening tools.

Tools to Monitor & Measure on Social Media:

1. Google Alerts: 

It’s a free tool; you can get email notifications any time that Google finds new results on a topic you’re interested in. Eg:- get updates about a product you like, find out when people post content about your brand on the web, or keep up with news stories.

2. Google Analytics: 

Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about a website's traffic and traffic sources and measures conversions and sales.

3. Facebook Insights:

Facebook Insights is a pretty powerful tool for those wanting to track user interaction on their Facebook Fan Page. Facebook Insights helps the page admin to track the number of active users, engagement, brand reach, virality & better understand page performance.

4 Klout: 

Influence is the ability to drive action. When you share something on social media or in real life and people respond, that’s influence. The more influential you are, the higher your Klout Score. It offers several ways to bring influencers & brands together.

5 PeerIndex: 

Very similar to Klout, it helps brands to identify the key influencers & content that really matter to them.

6 Tweetreach: 

TweetReach is a simple free tool to measure how far a hashtag reached on Twitter. It provides set of metrics to help you understand an idea's reach on Twitter, top contributors, top RTs etc

7 Bitly: 

Bitly is not only a URL shortening service but also lets you track the statistic of any bitly URL

8 Social Mention: 

Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, tweets from across the web into a single stream of Information. It’s one interface to know if your brand reputation across the social channels is negative or positive.

10. SproutSocial: 

It’s a paid social media management system, with functionality for teams to focus on engagement, publishing & analytics. Sprout makes it easy for the entire team to respond to customers on social and to know we’ve gotten back to each and every one. Provides great managing reports.

10. Alterian SM2:

Alterian SM2 is a business intelligence solution designed to provide visibility into social media and let brands tap into their customers' thoughts and opinions.

11. Radian6:

Very popular & desired social media tool. Powerful tool which will change the way you use digital marketing. Radian6 is a platform that enables organizations to monitor and engage in conversations across the social web. When you configure a search, the Radian6 platform retrieves results from more than 150 million sites and sources.

12. Sysomos: 

Sysomos helps you monitor, analyze, gather insights and ultimately, make the decisions that allow you to create better products and services for your customers

All the above tools lets you hear customers feedback, issues, suggestions...All that I can say with my experience is - You build customer loyalty and connection not by answering fast, but by engaging with respect and transparency.

So let’s not social media be all about no of Facebook likes, Twitter followers, Youtube views, Unique page views...let it be a platform where customers feel heard & connected to brands. 

Is telecom's voice business dead ?

I think sadly YES, many of today’s voice players will be unless they can stop thinking like Telcos and adapt to new market realities – One of the take away from recently held Capacity Asia.

All Telco executives feel that there are still ways to make money in the voice business, but they aren’t the old ways of making money, and voice players better discover new ways and fast. The voice margins already so low, particularly in market like India, that being in the voice business is almost close to “slavery”. There is major impact from OTT players like Skype on the voice business, but Telcos had no one to blame but themselves for Skype’s success at their expense.

The Voice service providers are “so strangled by the telecoms way of thinking,” seeing India’s voice tariffs, which are so low. I hope that service providers might offer voice for free and make money from it in other ways, such as advertising. But no one will consider this because the shareholders still think like telecoms. They think inside the box when the only thing inside the box is a dead body!

Once a Facebook executive in Singapore was asked, “Since Facebook has 800 million users, why not charge them a dollar a month and make $9.6 billion a year? He replied: ‘That’s a telco’s mindset’.”
“Telcos are not good innovators. But they are good at engineering and operating networks. They don’t make apps, but they partner with those who do and layer our superior network and engineering experience, and come up with a better customer experience.

Telcos probably couldn’t execute a Facebook-like model where the experience is subsidized, but can create a local flavor of Facebook or Skype in ways that those companies can’t because Telcos know the local markets better.

One important point to note that:
1) The success of OTT services depends on the level of broadband penetration, which creates a distinction between developed and developing markets.
2) In Nepal, or India or Srilanka or Pak, OTT is not such a threat yet, so traditional voice is still thriving.

Recently KDDI’s mobile phone tied up with OTT player ie., Skype and want to make Skype as default option for voice on KDDI’s mobile phones. COO of KDDI says “Skype has had a big impact on our volumes, but we realized we can’t stop it, so we had to look at how to generate new business with it,”

So I feel still lot of business exist for Telcos, they can still rock provided they start thinking differently.

Planet of Apps Europe 2010 – Day 1 “Developer Day”

Keynote talk on Delivering Differentiated Apps and Maximizing Revenue with BlackBerry: by Tyler Lessard

Gets on the stage to Introduce Blackberry’s strategy, ”Super apps” are application that people use every day, as opposed to disposable ones. They are launching “InApp” payment, but believe that the future is most likely free apps with added features purchased within the app. They are connected with operators to open operator billing, enabling customers without credit card to access the servies.

Advertising is become a big part of their offering and Analytics are becoming a full part of the platform. BBM will be soon open to developers in order to support building a Social Platform. RIM will have right device to support Adobe technology.

BlackBerry PlayBook is delivering a high end internet experience. They didn’t wanted to take phone platform to make a tablet so they went for a full fledge high end computing OS” – That was the move of buying QNX.

Keynote Presentation: Building applications that utilize location-based services : by Raimo Van from Layar

Started off by saying “We’re adding experience on top of your world”. The Layar ecosystem is composed of 3 parts: Publishing on your computer, a Discovery Browser and a Player Browser. Just as Youtube, they decided that the player should be available for developers to integrate it in their apps. Challenges are on the side of sensors, integration and testing, porting.

They have 1m + users worldwide. Concluded by saying, “don’t be an app, be a platform/browser don’t do it alone!”

Powering Communities to create an index of the real world: by Jan-Joost Kraal from eBuddy

eBuddy apps are on iPhone and Android. They use in app ads. The click through rate is higher on a native app than on a browser version.”. Being having issues with the iPhone SDK advertisement platform they choose AdMob platform and are happy with the results. For mobile advertizing

funding model, a lot of traffic is needed.

Discoverability/Findability is an issue. So they changed their name to ‘eBuddy messenger’ because people search for ‘messenger'. HTML5 looks like a good opportunity but they are lacking the distribution channel.

Partnering with social media to achieve profitability: by Romain Ehrhard from Tellmewhere

Tip: “Use the social network to kickstart your community, Make sure that you still remain independent from the social networks, you never know what happens”.

Branding is important. Don’t have localized name, fails to work for internationals.

Build vs Buy? – What will lead to long term commercial success?: by Dave Addey from Agant

Do you really need an app, or do you just want one? Apps are there to kill time. We know where you live! We also know where you are. Next train home – one button that let you know when your next train home is, so that you can get one more pint at the pub.

If you have a great idea and you know it makes sense, go for an app, but just do it well. They think that iOS is the best platform: stable, appstore, being long time in the business and have a established platform.

Apps vs Browser: by Mark Curtis from Flirtomatic

Currently it is very hard to make browser compete with app because; Touchscreen UI brings expectations of Sideswipe, Pinch and expand and Access to key functionality like camera, gallery, GPS. Now Google pointing the way for HTML 5.

Both need to capture attention in noisy market and advertising works but hard to sustain. Viral on mobile not yet as effective as web. Browser search becoming very cost effective, but where is app search ?