Marissa Mayer, chief executive of Yahoo, has said that 2014 will be a ‘tipping point’ for the evolution of the Internet, with most users coming from mobile devices.
Speaking at a debate about the future of the digital economy at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mayer said: “Really fundamental things are happening. When you look at mobile, when you look at the bandwidth, when you look at the Internet of things, it’s going to change everyone’s daily routines really fundamentally.”
“By the end of this year we (Yahoo) will have more mobile traffic than PC traffic,” she added.
Back in 2010, internet research firm Comscore predicted that mobile users would surpass desktop users within five years, utilizing data available from Morgan Stanley.
The Yahoo CEO also told delegates at the World Economic Forum said that the current data privacy situation is “murky” and called for a global debate on transparency following revelations of data monitoring by the National Security Agency (NSA), together with other panelists including John T. Chambers, chairman and chief executive of technology company Cisco, Randall L.Stephenson, chairman and chief executive of telecoms company AT&T, and Gavin Patterson, chief executive of U.K. telecoms company BT.
“When you go through security at the airport, when you sign up for a driver’s license, you know exactly what you getting from the government in exchange,” she said.
“I think that’s what’s murky…people don’t know what information is being collected and how it’s being used. And that’s the transparency that we are asking for and trying to awaken a debate on.”