In recent Cisco report entitled, “Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile
Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2011–2016″ researches found the following:
Mobile data traffic will reach the following milestones within the next five years.
Monthly global mobile data traffic will surpass 10 exabytes in 2016.
Over 100 million smartphone users will belong to the “gigabyte club” (over 1 GB per month) by 2012.
The number of mobile-connected devices will exceed the world’s population in 2012.
The average mobile connection speed will surpass 1 Mbps in 2014.
Due to increased usage on smartphones, handsets will exceed 50 percent of mobile data traffic in 2014.
Monthly global mobile data traffic will surpass 10 exabytes in 2016.
Monthly mobile tablet traffic will surpass 1 exabyte per month in 2016.
Tablets will exceed 10 percent of global mobile data traffic in 2016.
China will exceed 10 percent of global mobile data traffic in 2016.
Global mobile data traffic will increase 18-fold between 2011 and 2016.
By the end of 2012, the number of mobile-connected devices will exceed the number of people on earth, and by 2016 there will be 1.4 mobile devices per capita.
Mobile network connection speeds will increase 9-fold by 2016.
In 2016, 4G will be 6 percent of connections, but 36 percent of total traffic.
Two-thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2016.
Mobile-connected tablets will generate almost as much traffic in 2016 as the entire global mobile network in 2012.
Mobile Data Traffic Will Double Again in 2012
Cisco estimates that traffic in 2012 will grow 2.1-fold (110 percent), reflecting a continuation in the tapering of growth rates. The evolving device mix and the migration of traffic from the fixed network to the mobile network have the potential to bring the growth rate higher, while tiered pricing and traffic offload may reduce this effect.
The current growth rates of mobile data traffic resemble those of the fixed network from 1997 through 2001, when the average yearly growth was 150 percent.
Conclusion
Mobile data services are well on their way to becoming necessities for many network users. Mobile voice service is already considered a necessity by most, and mobile data, video, and TV services are fast becoming an essential part of consumers’ lives. Used extensively by consumer as well as enterprise segments, with impressive uptakes in both developed and emerging markets, mobility has proven to be transformational. Mobile subscribers are growing rapidly and bandwidth demand due to data and video is increasing. Mobile M2M connections continue to increase.
The next 5 years are projected to provide unabated mobile video adoption despite uncertain macroeconomic conditions in many parts of the world. Backhaul capacity must increase so mobile broadband, data access, and video services can effectively support consumer usage trends and keep mobile infrastructure costs in check.
Deploying next-generation mobile networks requires greater service portability and interoperability. With the proliferation of mobile and portable devices, there is an imminent need for networks to allow all these devices to be connected transparently, with the network providing high-performance computing and delivering enhanced real-time video and multimedia. This openness will broaden the range of applications and services that can be shared, creating a highly enhanced mobile broadband experience. The expansion of wireless presence will increase the number of consumers who access and rely on mobile networks, creating a need for greater economies of scale and lower cost per bit.
As many business models emerge with new forms of advertising, media and content partnerships, mobile services including M2M, live gaming, and (in the future) augmented reality, a mutually beneficial situation needs to be developed for service providers and over-the-top providers. New partnerships, ecosystems, and strategic consolidations are expected as mobile operators, content providers, application developers, and others seek to monetize the video traffic that traverses mobile networks. Operators must solve the challenge of effectively
monetizing video traffic while increasing infrastructure capital expenditures. They must become more agile and able to quickly change course and provide innovative services to engage the Web 3.0 consumer.While the net neutrality regulatory process and business models of operators evolve, there is an unmet demand from consumers for the highest quality and speeds. As wireless technologies aim to provide experiences formerly only available through wired networks, the next few years will be critical for operators and service providers to plan future network deployments that will create a adaptable platform upon which will deploy the multitude of mobile-enabled devices and applications of the future.
For More Information
Inquiries can be directed to traffic-inquiries@cisco.com.
From the Forrestor Report entitled, Interactive Marketing Priorities For SMBs.
Interactive over traditional tactics. Seventy-seven percent of SMBs surveyed reported their 2010 interactive marketing budgets increasing or staying the same as compared with 2009. Of those increasing budgets, 54% said they will decrease budget for traditional marketing tactics like TV, radio, direct mail, and print, in order to fund the increases in interactive.
Report Recommendations
SMBs Should Lead Interactive Innovation
- Tackle the low-hanging fruit.
- Exploit existing internal resources.
- Prioritize technologies that create efficiencies.
- Utilize on-demand campaign automation solutions.
Report available for a free download from the Adobe Marketing Insights website.
To explain EdgeRank, Facebook’s popularity algorithm, it’s somewhat important to have a based knowledge of Google’s PageRank algorithm.
Knowing how algorithms affects your brand online is a critical marketing and reputation management skill. Your ability to work these algorithms to your advantage can lead to more sales. Knowing how algorithms can make it easier and harder to reach your target audience online requires a bit of left and right brain juggling but for content marketers, knowing the way your code appeals or shuns these two ranking algorithms is mission critical.
Facebook’s EdgeRank is currently much more difficult to view in action than Google’s PageRank. The tools are limited at the time of this writing although you may want to try, the EdgeRank checker at http://edgerankchecker.com.” Use at your own risk.
EdgeRank also requires a separate understanding from Google’s PageRank algorithm. Although both attempt to measure the “importance” of content for example, they’re quite different in their application.
Less is currently known about Edgerank. For example, there is no Wikipedia article for Edgerank. Yet hundreds of thousands of articles including a Wikipedia article exists for Google’s PageRank. Start there and work your way outwards to other PageRank articles and experts like Matt Cutts and Danny Sullivan.
Jeff Widman has written a great primer on EdgeRank. Other have written about and put more effort into testing EdgeRank. He in part, defines EdgeRank as Facebook’s attempt “to predict how interesting each story will be to each user.”
To learn more about how it works, why you should care and how other Facebook algorithms compliment the Facebook news feed, check out Jeff’s website.
http://www.chrisbryanfilms.com
The Photocrati Fund offers $5000 grants to photographers to undertake important humanitarian and environmental photography projects.
Learn more about the Photocrati Theme and the Photocrati Fund.
I’m fairly sure Baby Boomers will stay with Facebook for years to come. Many may even retire never having used another network like Google Circles. After all it took most baby boomers more than ten years to get a gmail address.
Most folks will never go to Facebook to do their searches. Doesn’t mean Facebook on page seo should be overlooked in any way. I’m still using fbml to give my clients an advantage in search for example. This holds even if Facebook stops hiding business page content from Google today.
Aside: Search rose in popularity because of the interface design or lack thereof. We’ll see the same during the next feature contraction of the Internet -maybe in 2012.
Facebook is big but it’s not going get bigger than search unless and until they merge with Microsoft and Yahoo Search, which they may do. See: http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-microsoft-receive-go-ahead-to-implement-search-deal-36465 They still will not be bigger than “search” as a result but they could become the most popular search engine. For Facebook Pages or Twitter to be more popular than Google Pages, Facebook would need to be more popular than search itself.
I agree with: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/11/google-plus-pages/
Facebook Pages are of course much more popular and helpful to business owners right now “in the social space.” But unless they open their content to Google’s index, they’ll stay confined to the Facebook Search ecology.
The likelyhood that “Google Pages” will be easier to find requires business owners and marketers to take notice. Especially while Facebook continues to exclude content from the google.
Therefore, I continue to recommend Facebook business pages and the expansion thereof for business owners. Today I’m hoping my clients will jump into the url grab and secure their brand on Google Pages.
If I’m right, Google Pages will rank better and offer better longterm roi as a result. If I’m wrong, no mattah, good having both.
As a Google Solution Provider I’m simply sharing that my first experiences with Google Pages have been “really” positive.
While it’s perfectly okay to remain unaware of the ongoing growth rate in data, as a typical Internet user, it’s not okay for a Professional Web Marketer to do the same. We all feel the pace of change on the Internet. As a Web Professional that provides strategic advice or recommendations it’s critical to keep wrapping your mind around the velocity and subsequent impacts for your clients. While most clients are engaged in cost-reduction strategies, helping some clients understand the benefits of advertising can be really challenging. Keep reading. This may help.
Many smaller clients are still learning to embrace cost-reductions gained from SaaS ie; the cloud using services like Google Apps or WordPress or open source platforms. Many clients are still learning to calculate total costs of ownership. A balanced scorecard would reveal that cost reductions in advertising should be mindful of lower customer acquisition costs.
More than clicks, views and other digital actions, professional online marketers understand how to create and manage successful advertising campaigns that consistently pull “market share” for a client. The challenge in local digital economies where most web professionals serve small business is to keep themselves and their clients from what I would call, Cliff-diving.
Cliff-diving is when you become stagnant. In the case of web professionals it’s when you learn about and even master a particular SaaS, software platform or even a stand alone tool and stick with it too long. Consider the auto mechanic that gets certified for and makes a career out of working on carburetors never learning about fuel injection. This is happening to many professional online marketers in the advertising space.
Cliff-diving used to be okay for Web Professionals. Jumping into tools like Photoshop and Dreamweaver has worked for millions of web professionals. But in the advertising space, everything is changing more rapidly. A web professional betting their career on any platform could easily find themselves looking for a job in a few years as more agile web professionals come onto the scene.
Time will tell if the data explosion which I believe we’re now experiencing is geometric or exponential but it certainly continues to create a lot of digital energy. Harnessing this new form of energy can help your clients reduce costs and attract new customers. The rise in Internet traffic, lead collection forms and more cookies are all creating more data than we can mine and keep anonymous. Read “Introduction to Shannon Entropy.”
Online advertisers may similarly consider astro-physicist attempting to explain our Universe as new planets are being discovered on a somewhat regular basis. Or it may help to consider a metaphor by Nicolas Negroponte (read: Being Digital) when he suggested that we’re shifting from processing atoms to processing bits. In my humble opinion this explains today’s opportunities in manufacturing. Use this to understand advertising as a form of manufacturing if it helps your clients.
Please also consider helping your clients by thinking of mom and pop websites where the best data is available as a result of providing the right service or product. In other words, a single, small, niche website owner may have access to better information about a customer’s behavior than Facebook considering the fact that Facebook is currently locked into a digital environment. Many of your local clients have cash registers. It’s going to take a lot of QR codes for Facebook to ever achieve the quality of data a local website can successfully mine. The “a-ha” for me is realizing that each client will be capable of owning their own ad network and this ability will be built into the code.
So the awareness shift might be in knowing that website visitors, even those most concerned with privacy are still leaving bread crumbs behind that tell us way more about their behavior than existing digital networks like the open graph are capable of providing.
While some of the most capable Web Professionals have chosen the path of cliff-diving it’s encumbant on future Web Professionals to help customers go beyond existing networks and harness the opportunities within their customer base. Learn to leverage existing while securing new data by helping your clients understand the need to learn as much as possible about their visitors, customers and prospects.
This is the data they already have access too and the data that you’ll help them access via new strategies and tactics to help your clients “own” and build their own ad network functionality into everything they do online. Offline opportunities in particular will help them reduce costs and attract new customers.
A potential take-away: Web Professionals must learn new ways to serve clients using innovative data collection techniques that respect the privacy of the customers your clients serve.
