Several Nuggets in Mary Meeker’s Web 2.0 Summit Presentation

For the last several years, Mary Meeker, an analyst for Morgan Stanley, has put together a compelling presentation on the state of the Internet and technology, and presented her thoughts at the annual Web 2.0 Summit. That summit just concluded, and you can view her presentation here on YouTube. The slide deck is embedded above.

Her presentation isn’t “light reading,” but it contains important information that can be valuable to almost anyone in business. Because Meeker is an analyst in an industry that must carefully watch what it recommends, you sometimes have to read between the lines to get the full impact of what she is saying. However, there are some things that clearly stood out:

• Meeker started the presentation with a quick, but in-depth analysis of what led us to our present economic situation. While not discounting the severity of the downturn, the takeaway from her presentation was that we have seen great contractions like this before, but eventually innovation will again have us on the road to growth.

• Meeker said, “If I was an advertiser, I would be focused on innovating in the low CPM categories [social networking, online video, VOIT] to take advantage of what is a huge arbitrage opportunity.”

• She stated mobile will be the biggest area of opportunity for technology and marketers, and that one of the biggest changes in mobile will be its transformation to a Web-centric platform.

• Meeker emphasized there are a lot of services/products that have and will help the mobile revolution along, including 3G, Apple’s iPhone, and other emerging smartphones from competing companies. However, she felt the biggest single factor to growing mobile was the introduction of Google’s Android platform.

• Another big trend Meeker predicted is a large increase in laptop computers that use wireless 3G networks to access the cloud.