Mary Meeker was the original Queen of the Net.
I loved her research reports 14 years ago when she was the top Internet analyst at Morgan Stanley and I love her “State of the Internet” presentations she seems to give every 6 months now in her new job at a partner working at Kleiner Perkins.
Earlier this year, Cisco (CSCO) predicted in its Visual Networking Index that the number of mobile devices in use around the globe would exceed the world’s population by the end of 2012. That projection came along with a tally showing a strong 2011, when mobile data traffic surged by 133%.
The next logical question then, is which companies are best-positioned to succeed in the mobile space from here? Eric Jackson, founder of Ironfire Capital, points to companies like Google, (GOOG), Yahoo! (YHOO) [the publisher of this website] and Facebook (FB) as the winners in terms of total users across both their mobile and desktop platforms. However, he also believes that some powerful smaller players may unseat the big names as mobile use continues to skyrocket.
“Certain verticals are going to be big winners in mobile,” says Jackson. “Music is unquestionably going to be a big winner. Directory information like the kind of stuff you get off of Yelp (YELP) obviously is [also] going to continue to do well.”
My comments this morning on Squawk on the Street about Apple’s trading action in the last few weeks.
Here’s my recent chat with Jeff Macke on Yahoo Finance about RIM.
Don’t look now, but shares of BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion (RIMM) are up over 50% since the start of November. Several analyst upgrades for RIM have created a splash of confidence that’s having a positive ripple effect for the stock price. But the sustainability of the recent rise is contingent upon success of the BlackBerry 10, expected to officially launch on January 30 and begin shipping in February.
ast night, there was an interesting Techcrunch post on how Facebook(FB) might acquire WhatsApp.
What is WhatsApp? As my friend Ben Evans said a few weeks ago in Forbes, it’s “the biggest social network you’ve never heard of.”
WhatsApp is a cross-platform smartphone app that lets you send text and picture messages for free, using your data allowance. There are dozens of these services, referred to by telcos as ‘OTT’ (Over The Top) services if they’re feeling polite, ‘parasites’ if they’re grump and ‘arbitrage services’ (since they let you arbitrage between SMS and data pricing) if they’re being precise. BBM (Blackberry Messenger), with 60m users, is perhaps the most generally known, but WhatsApp is one of the biggest.
Last Thursday night, Geoff Beattie departed as head of private holding company Woodbridge Co. Ltd.
Woodbridge is the holding company for the powerful Thomson family of Canada. The Thomsons are best known in the US for taking their very successful data company (Thomson Corp) and buying Reuters in 2007, creating Thomson Reuters.
Thomson Reuters has been suffering of late. Bloomberg, it turns out, is a pretty tough competitor in the data space. And journalism is hard to make money from.
