Internet Evolution site editor Nicole Ferraro shares a compelling story from the floor of the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

Nicole reports that Morgan Stanley‘s managing director, Mary Meeker says that over the next few years the mobile Web will be “bigger than most people think.” In fact, she’s calling it “the next major computing cycle,” and says mobile-related technology shifts will change all the dynamics between incumbents and attackers, and will create a wide range of winners and losers.

Meeker presented 68 slides, starting with an economy update / dashboard. Included were positive leading indicators like rebounding global stock markets, narrowing credit spreads, reduced market volatility, and rising earnings estimates.

The technology sector (as has been previously noted in this blog), Meeker says, is leading the charge back to financial health as the largest sector measured by S&P 500 market capitalization (19%). She also showed how global technology revenue estimates mimic the 2002 recovery that followed the tech nadir of 2001.

Now granted, when Meeker turns to domestic GDP and consumption, she is only able to call the trends “less bad,” and she does say that low capacity utilization in manufacturing, horribly low home sales, rising consumer credit and mortgage defaults, and high unemployment all imply economic weakness.

But unemployment peaks are typically key for economic turnarounds, Meeker says, and global GDP growth forecasts, led by China and India, are positive for 2010. Advertising spending, too, should grow in 2010, and consumer confidence seems to have bottomed out in February and has been heading up all year.

Then Meeker turned to the promise of the mobile Internet. And Meeker is bullish like crazy about mobile Internet! Driven, she says, by unprecedented next-generation-platform-induced changes in communication and commerce, mobile-related share shifts will “create/destroy material shareholder wealth.” YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are well noted. And not shockingly, the poster child for the uptake of mobile devices on IP-based networks is iPhone/iTouch usage (“fastest hardware user growth in consumer history” ).

The next big thing in computing follows a logical evolution, Meeker illustrates by slide 32. Increasing levels of integration will provide an incredible opportunity in semiconductors, hardware, software, and services as the rate of mobile Internet adoption makes desktop Internet adoption look so last-century. This statement I particularly loved: “Mobile devices will evolve as remote controls for ever expanding types of real-time cloud-based services…empowering consumers in unprecedented and transformative ways.”

Quoting from Mathew Honan in Wired magazine’s January issue, Meeker shares this: “Millions of people are now walking around with a gizmo in their pocket that not only knows where they are, but also plugs into the Internet.” Heavy mobile data users will triple to more than 1 billion by the end of 2013 (AT&T alone has had a 50x increase in mobile data traffic in the past 3 years).

These are exciting times for technology makers, marketers, and users. My passion for, and faith in technology has kept me bullish throughout the downturn, and I can hardly contain my enthusiasm for what’s coming as we turn this innovation economy skyward once again.

The full set of slides from Meeker’s presentation are available here, and are worth going through in their entirety.

Arbor Networks (along with the University of Michigan and Merit Network) have put together the “Internet Observatory Report” which they say is the largest study of global Internet traffic ever. The report analyzes two years worth of detailed traffic statistics from 110 large and geographically diverse cable operators, international transit backbones, regional networks and content providers. 

While the report includes discussion around significant changes in Internet topology and commercial inter-relationships between providers; analysis of changes in Internet protocols and applications; it is the concluding analysis of Internet growth trends and predictions of future trends that provides the most interesting food for thought.

Whereas five years ago, Internet traffic was distributed fairly evenly across tens of thousands of web sites and servers around the world, most content has now clustered around a small number of very large hosting, cloud and content providers.

Out of the 40,000 routed end sites, 30 large companies (what Arbor calls “hyper giants”) like Limelight, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and YouTube now generate and consume 30% of all Internet traffic.

In addition, while Internet applications historically communicated across numerous application-specific protocols and communication stacks, just a few web and video protocols now dominate (including video over web and Adobe Flash). Arbor says other mechanisms for video and application distribution like P2P (peer-to-peer) have declined dramatically in the last two years (this drop seems to be what most people are focusing on, but I personally don’t find it that surprising).

The report’s final key finding is that macroeconomic forces have “radically transformed” the global Internet ecosystem. A wave of innovation is ongoing, says Arbor, with service providers now offering everything from triple play services to managed security services, VPNs and increasingly, CDNs.

I can’t help but agree strongly that these changes in particular have significant and ongoing implications for backbone engineering, design of Internet scale applications and research.