Saudi Internet users topped the list of those who share their public and private lives online, according to a US report on the Internet and computing trends.
The Meeker Report said Saudi respondents were most likely to share “everything” and “most things” online. It added that online sharing, including status updates, feelings, photos, video and other links. India occupies second place in this category.
About 60 percent of Saudis surveyed said they share “everything” or “most things” online compared to 15 percent in the United States and 10 percent in France. The annual study, conducted by venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and a technology wizard, Mary Meeker, studies smartphone and Internet dissemination, the rise of tablet computing, and even the outcome of immigration in the United States on the tech industry.
The study named after Meeker, the analyst whose annual status reports are widely read in the technology community. The report has also predicted that Saudi Arabia will have a wide smartphone subscriber base this year. It shows an enormous mobile broadband subscriptions that exceeded 11.7 million last year.
Saudi Arabia, where mobile subscriptions exceed 54 million, has, however, reported a drop in the number of subscriptions because of the CITC decision on regulating the sale and activation of prepaid SIM cards. Yet it is predicted that demand for Internet services will increase significantly in the next few years in the Kingdom due to the availability of fiber option networks at very high speeds, growing Internet content, and the spread of handheld smart devices and applications.
Another behavioral study the report came up with was analyzing how and when people reach out for their smartphones.
Users use their smartphones up to nearly 150 times a day, of which nearly 18 times is to check the time and 23 times for messaging. Meeker’s data shows there are now 2.4 billion Internet users in the world, up by 8 percent from one year ago, with the biggest growth coming from emerging markets.
The vast majority of these new users are accessing the web using mobile devices. There are now 1.5 billion mobile subscribers, up from 1.1 billion a year ago, representing a growth rate of almost 30 percent globally. The study shows that mobile devices now account for 15 percent of all web traffic in the world. On average, more than 500 million photos are uploaded to the web every day and that figure is set to double each year for the next few years.
The unlikely leader here is Snapchat, with Facebook and Instagram not far behind.
The study also notes that the online world has “become more social and content rich, with expanded use of photos, video and audio,” with the future already appearing in “early signs of growth for wearable computing devices, like glasses, connected wrist bands and watches.”