I am looking at Mary Meeker’s slides from her presentation yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit.

Several of my fellow tech bloggers and journos have run through the slides. You can see what they say, here, here, here and here.

Mary Meeker makes the point that the mega-trend of the 21st Century is the empowerment of people through connected, mobile devices.  Her focus is on smartphones. My view:  The megatrend of our times is connected devices and the Internet of Things.

As a note, Mary Meeker puts most of her focus on the growth of smartphone shipments; mobile search; mobile advertising; mobile commerce; social networks; operating systems; the changing nature of content creation and the growth of the user base for mobile and Internet usage.

Here is a copy of her presentation:

KPCB Internet Trends (2011)

But she does not make any mention of the Internet of Things.  I think that is an important omission.

The Internet of Things will mirror the growth of connected devices. The two are interconnected and will shape the course for how mobile devices create that personal interconnection that Meeker talks about.

Here are just a few examples:

According to SiliconFilter, Ford and Google have teamed up to for a research project that will use Google’s prediction API to help drivers save gas and drive more efficiently. In this case, the automobile becomes the device itself. People will connect through the automobile to communicate with people and things.

Chetan Sharma is considered as one of the most authorative sources about the Internet of Things. In a recent blog post he writes:

Mobility is also getting ingrained in the everyday objects, which make up for a fundamental reassessment of how things are done across industries in almost every region of the world. It is not just the phones and the data cards that are being enabled by the broadband connectivity but also the everyday electronic devices such as the tablets, eReaders, automobiles, picture frames, and cameras.

And finally, there is the network effect that is occurring. The more devices we connect, the more need we have for embedded sensors. These sensors will form the future data fabric that we will move across and through in a mulitdimensional manner that will challenge our views of space and time.

Services Angle

My point here is the connection that service providers need to make between smartphones and everything else. The mobile smartphone is simply a receiver and a transmitter. We receive data and we send data. Things are doing that now, too.

Mary Meeker does a great job of pointing to the future and how connected devices are transforming our lives. But the Internet of Things is equally important and forces us to think what we really mean by a mobile device.