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Mobile Internet traffic gaining fast on desktop Internet traffic

VC Mary Meeker's year-end Internet trends report shows explosion in all things mobile, especially smartphones and apps.

Steven Musil Night Editor / News
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Steven Musil
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Mobile traffic is growing so fast globally that in some places it has already surpassed desktop traffic.

That was one of the key conclusions of a year-end Internet trends report delivered this evening at Stanford University by Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist Mary Meeker.

Once known as "Queen of the Net," Meeker reported that 13 percent of all Internet traffic is now executed from a mobile device, up from 4 percent just two years ago. In tech-savvy India, mobile Internet traffic has reached 60 percent, surpassing desktop Internet traffic, which has declined to 40 percent.

Monetization of the mobile sector is also growing rapidly, turning in a compounded annual growth rate of 129 percent in the past four years. Mobile apps will take home the lion's share of the $19 billion the sector is expected to generate this year, 67 percent compared with the 33 percent generated by ads.

Other key tidbits in the report:

• Sales of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are expected to gradually increase over the next three years, moving more than 1.7 billion units in 2015. Meanwhile, sales of PC and laptops are expected to remain relatively anemic with less than 400 million units sold.

• The adoption rate of Android phones in the first 16 quarters after their launch has well eclipsed the rate at which people bought iPhones in their first 16 quarters on the market, with more than 600 million Android handsets sold compared with Apple's 100 million, she found.

• Nearly 30 percent of adults in the U.S. own a tablet or e-reader, an impressive adoption rate considering that less than three years ago only 2 percent owned one of the gadgets.

The report also touched on the ways technology has dramatically changed our lives in the past few years, from smartphones vs. sole-purpose cameras to social media vs. newspapers and even file storage, mobile payments, and education.

See the entire slide show presentation below: