So it's that time of the year again. The moment when Mary Meeker , Partner at Silicon Valley VC outfit Kleiner Perkins, former Morgan Stanley analyst and one time "Queen of the Net", dusts off the PowerPoint presentation, fires up the projector, and publishes a year’s worth tasty, tasty charts and graphs on all things dotcom. And all of it to the delight of internet entrepreneurs, corporate strategy managers and lazy marketing directors the world over.
Meeker is like a one woman Xerox PARC for internet research (actually there's probably dozens of stressed out underlings running around frantically doing the legwork for her but why spoil a good simile) and the presentation is always one of the most anticipated of the year. It not only sets the news agenda for the next few days, it sets the business development agenda at many companies for the year ahead.
You get to view the whole shooting match over here at scribd , but the tech press is already starting to pull out the vignettes.
Meeker's presentations are always full of gotcha moments. Here’s one: There are more social network users today than there were users on the entire internet at the end of 2006, less than five years ago.
And how about this, 23 per cent of all clicks on Google are clicks on Ads.
Actually Grok found this factoid from a story about the presentation on the Forbes website, although it's hard to find the slide to support it. So it might be both horribly wrong and the start of a wonderful urban myth about the efficacy of search advertising.
Forbes has a stab boiling Meeker's presentation down a six pack of snippets. It includes our personal favorite — “Sound is going to be more important than video” — which we love because it's the kind of idea that’s so obvious it smacks you in the face.
Meeker was speaking at this year Web 2.0 Summit, currently underway in the US.
Away from the summit, there's another gobsmacking statistic to keep the water cooler conversation flowing. Mashable this morning reports that in the first 100 days, Google+'s 40 million users posted 3.4 billion (yes that b for billion) photographs.
Sixteen years ago, when Grok first abandoned journalism (the first of five unsuccessful attempts) global internet advertising revenues were $55 million. This year, the estimate is $73 billion.
Andrew Birmingham is the CEO of Silicon Gully Investments. He is too busy pouring over Meeker's presentation to write anymore for now. Follow his on Twitter @ag_birmingham