The Mobile Internet: You won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is

• There are 2.4 Billion Internet users, with growth continuing globally. 244 million Internet users are in the US. We are really wired.
• The top Internet properties by monthly visitors are all “Made in the USA”. By monthly unique visitors they are: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, Apple, Glam Media network.
• The top global smartphone operating systems are also “Made in the USA.” Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android have won. Other platforms exist (Windows, Blackberry and more), but are going to be less relevant going forward. Share of market held by iOS and Android may be fluid.
• According to IDC, the amount of global digital information created and shared, from documents to pictures to tweets, has grown 9 times larger in five years to nearly 2 zettabytes in 2011. Driver of this growth is photos, over 500 million uploaded and shared per day, much of that on Facebook and Snapchat. Video contributions up from nothing six years ago to 100 hours per minute uploaded to YouTube. Twitter Vine growing dramatically. Persistent video from Dropcam new entry and growing fast. Dropcam use cases include video telepresence for families.
• In social media, Facebook dominates, followed by YouTube, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, MySpace.
• Mobile traffic up and growing. All trends point to continued growth with probably 25% of all internet traffic being from global by 2014. There are 219 million smartphone users in the US, so almost 60% market penetration. Globally there are 1.5B smartphone users and over 5B mobile phone users so much more room for smartphone growth.
• Tablet growth is faster than mobile growth.
• While PCs will always be with us, we have just been overtaken by a wave of mobile (smartphones and tablets). Now standby for a wave of wearables, drivables, flyables, scannables.
• In the US, we have always on services connected to powerful devices in homes, businesses and a growing mobile smartphone/tablet base. This is building a growing network of unprecedented computing power and also socially enabled transparency. There will soon be no hiding.

Let me try to boil all that down to what I think is the most relevant point for enterprise technologists:

• The dispersing of powerful compute platforms to every citizen will speed the trend of software transforming entire industries. Government thought leaders and those in the companies around them should understand how this trend will change their world and seek to smartly accelerate it.

If you believe that (and I think it is pretty much just stating the obvious), then consider this: 

• The best at thinking through how this change to mobile will impact the government and federally focused industry are those that are connected themselves. We need more early adopters of mobile devices connected to cloud services who know the government missions and can help think through the best path forward in disrupting the status quo. Therefore, government and industry should empower 100% of their workers with secure, reliable, always on smart devices and should task their combined collective force with transforming the business of government from the inside out and bottom up.
• So, everyone in and around government should get a tablet or smartphone and should be smartly connected to their enterprises. Do this for two reasons: 1) The workforce will be better at their job, and 2) The workforce will be better able to drive the transformations of their organizations.