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Mary Meeker's Internet trends 2014: The business technology takeaways

Meeker's key points aren't exactly news flashes, but do highlight areas where enterprises---and their vendors---may be trailing. Here's a look.
Written by Larry Dignan, Contributor

Mary Meeker, a partner at venture firm Kleiner Perkins, released her annual Internet trends report at the Code Conference Wednesday and captured a few items that will impact technology and business line execs.

The items shown at the conference aren't exactly news flashes, but do highlight areas where enterprises---and their vendors---may be trailing.

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Here's a look at the business tech takeaways in the report.

Marketing: Meeker pointed out how the social graph and the messaging around it is changing from broadcasting few messages to a large audience like Facebook to frequent interactions with smaller groups of people. Those latter interactions may become more valuable to marketers. The issue for advertisers will be finding a way to wiggle into those messages on Snapchat, WhatsApp and Tencent without annoying customers.

Apps are being unbundled: Single purpose apps have exploded as even companies like Facebook have gone single use with Messenger and Instagram. The funny part is that enterprise software vendors are now often pitching the opposite and lining up their apps with a suite approach. Meanwhile, apps are really becoming service layers. Given enterprise software vendors are usually behind the curve give the move from a multipurpose app to single purpose about a year or so.

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Big data: Sensor use has exploded in devices. That reality gives companies a lot more data to mine.

Cloud: Compute costs have fallen 33 percent annually and storage costs are falling 38 percent. Bandwidth costs have declined 27 percent annually. All the data comes from Deloitte. Those falling costs have enabled the cloud and could put established hardware vendors in a bind.

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User interfaces matter. Meeker argued that bad user interfaces are going away as new ways to present industry applications emerge. That's true on the consumer front, but design isn't exactly a core enterprise competency...yet.

Mobile first. All enterprises need to be mobile first. Chances are strong that Internet touch points with customers will become mobile connections.

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