Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends is one of those annual must reads if you work in digital. So, I’ve had a look at the 196 page deck and picked out some of my stand-out bits. The full deck is embedded below, but you can also download it here.

• The Internet has reached 39% of the global population since 1995 – mobiles have spread faster, to 73% of the global population
• In terms of advertising, mobile is growing strongly (+34% year-on-year), while desktop advertising is slowing (+11% year-on-year). ‘Buy Buttons’ are appearing on mobile platforms so that people can buy things while on the go, with one tap, at the exact moment something takes their interest
• Video is going from large format and widescreen to small format and portrait (thank you Snapchat). While time spent watching horizontal screens has remained flat for the last five years, time spent watching vertical screens has grown from 0.4 to 2.8 hours a day!
• Old ways of working and doing business are changing: email is being subverted by platforms like Slack, cash registers by Square, paper based signatures by digital signatures, …
• Mobile messaging is massive: WhatsApp has 800 million monthly active users (+60% year-on-year) and facilitates 30 billion messages a day. As Meeker puts it: “Messaging leaders aiming to create cross-platform operating systems that are context-persistent communication hubs for more and more services” – or, to put that into English: people will expect a seamless connection between the various devices they use your product on and that the information delivered always needs to fit into their personal context
  
• Video views on Facebook are up from 1 billion to 4 billion a day in six months
• ‘Normal people’ are increasingly becoming the first source of news using Twitter / Dataminr
  
• Among 12-24 year olds in the US, Instagram is gaining in popularity, Twitter is dropping a little bit, but it’s Facebook that has seen the biggest drop: from 32% in 2013 to 14% in 2015
• Commercial drone use is very broad
  
• Millennials’ most valued work benefits are training, flexible hours and bonuses
• Many people use online marketplaces like airbnb or Uber to supplement their income: 61% of Uber drivers have another job!
• There are even some thoughts on how UX elements from Google (hiding something complex behind a simple front door), Instagram (removing choice to make things simpler) and Tinder (swiping right or left to rate) are making a difference elsewhere

Bits and bytes

• Google has launched Google Photos: unlimited storage, for free. For normal people the quality at which images are saved will be fine, but more serious photographers will look elsewhere: Google Photos doesn’t do RAW files. Still, for normal people the organisational power that the new service provides seem amazing. Take facial recognition for example: it will automatically recognise and group photos of various people, places, and things without you needing to add tags. It can even figure out faces with changing age!
• Apparently Millennials don’t care about owning anything – and it’s destroying traditional retail
• Lovely piece in the Harvard Business Review about the persuasiveness of the PostIt note
• Swipe right to order a curry – Dinder (yes, that’s dinner and Tinder) is here
• Great look inside usage stats for BBC iPlayer – turns out we use it more during the Winter months
• Amazon has launched ‘Amazon Stream‘ – a never-ending, Pinterest like online shopping experience

Videos of the week

Love this clip with New York-based graphic designer and typographer Stefan Sagmeister on how you’re not a storyteller.

Wateraid seem to believe that if men had periods “they would be considered a sign of virility, men would brag about them on Facebook, #imonmyperiod would trend regularly on twitter, and tampon adverts would be fronted by celebrities.” Now, whoever made this clip has obviously never spent any time with a poorly man. We don’t take pain particularly well. And that’s a huge understatement…

Still, if this campaign helps highlight that 1.25 billion women around the world do not have access to a toilet during their periods…

You may have seen Shia LeBeof’s motivational speech floating around the web this week. It’s intense. Lot’s of shouting. It was shot on a green screen as a part of an art project. Of course, the Internet has taken this clip and inserted Shia into a whole bunch of brilliant scenes. The Poke has a great round-up here.

The best one however is the TED talk mashup

And finally

The web reacts to Sepp Blatter’s resignation as head of Fifa