Where is Internet headed?

It's been a long time since I published a post. Very busy working in my new company to revamp the product portfolio and its marketing. It's a B2B software company and the question of course was: "what to have on our radar to think about the future releases of our applications".

My nickname in this new company is Emmanuel 2.0, you wonder why? That's because you're a newcomer to this blog. So here we are, trying to figure out the major Internet trends. I've always been fond of supporting my hunches with data. So let's deal with the claims first and the figures to follow.
Claim#1: The Internet is growing still very fast (5M new users per week) thus making e-commerce king
Claim#2: The Internet is growing mobile (2.8B mobile phones in 2007 growing to 3.8B in 2011 to be compared with 980M PCs in 2007 growing to 1.5B according to Gartner). "Worldwide sales of mobile phones to end-users surpassed 1,15bn units in 2007, a 16% increase from 2006 sales", Computing SA citing Gartner. And if you're wondering what is the major customer benefit iPhones brings (4M units sold in 2 quarters), here is my take: real and easy web browsing. I can at least speak for myself, I do not fire up my PC at home to navigate on the web and checkout my facebook page, I use my iPhone.
Claim#3: Web 2.0 is driving the webtop metaphor vs the desktop metaphor (check my post "from desktop to webtop" about it)

Now with the additional figure about e-commerce: "eMarketer predicts that online retailers in the US will ring up over $100 billion more in sales in 2012 than they did in 2007. Sales growth will come mainly from consumers who are shifting their spending from traditional retail stores to the Internet.", eMarketer. Take a look at the table for more details, but you can easily figure out that buying behavior and for that matter marketing web behavior are shifting big time. I would strongly advise to revise your marketing mix to accommodate at least 20-25% to web marketing including viral marketing techniques.

Finally, and I'm sure we'll agree easily, web content has also shifted to video and pictures. For this one, I'll let you find the figures. Let's rock marketing on the web for 2008 fellow marketeers.