Last month, I wrote a post summarizing Mary Meeker’s recent presentation at Web 2.0.   I was recently thinking more about the implications to retailers.  As a recap, below are some key facts and comments by Meeker.

From the wireless arena:

• GPS – 421MM GPS Chips were sold in 2008(e) representing 57% annual growth.  Cell phones and PDAs were 60% of shipments.
• 3G – 490MM global users.  Grew at a 45% annual rate in Q2 09.  3G users are 12% of the mobile user population forecasted to grow to 44% by 2013.
• Wi-Fi – 319MM chipsets were sold in 2008E.
• AT&T’s mobile data traffic is up 50X in the past three years – a 4,932% increase!
• Wi-Fi is still growing considerably.  There are currently 35MM hotspots.  Interestingly, 42% of iPhone usage happens on Wi-Fi networks.
• Mary predicts 3G usage will hit an inflection point in 2010 (>20% usage).
• Mary believes that location-based services are key to the mobile internet ’secret sauce’.

Facebook and Apple are driving independent but overlapping innovations in social networking and mobile platforms:

• Facebook has 390MM users representing 153% annual growth.  There are 350,000 apps, and 500MM downloads.  People are spending 6B minutes on Facebook each day!  YouTube and Twitter are also significant and growing.
• Apple iPhone/iPod Touch has 57MM users, representing 166% annual growth, 100K apps and 2B downloads.
• Apple unshackled mobile developers from Carrier “walled gardens”.  The iPhone/iTouch represent the fastest hardware user growth in consumer technology history.

Japan is leading the way in the mobile space.  If you look at the 2008 world-wide mobile internet revenue mix, it resembles Japan in 2000.  If you look at Japan today as a proxy for where the rest of the world is headed, you see slight growth in mobile advertising revenue, but greater market share growth in mobile paid services (travel booking, mobile banking) and mobile online commerce (retail sales of physical goods and digital goods such as ringtones, wallpaper) and a lower percentage of revenue coming from mobile data access.   In Japan, mobile is currently running around 18% of total eCommerce revenue.

So, what does this mean for retailers?  Stay tuned for the next post on Wednesday…