At Google Inc.’s Think Mobile event in New York, industry guru Mary Meeker said that the pace and force of mobile growth is unlike anything she has ever seen.” —

Mary Meeker, the leading trumpeter of the Internet in its early days and now a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, is now saying mobile is growing faster than the Web did.

She’s got her evidence …

• Shipments of smartphones and tablet computers outpaced desktop PCs and notebook PCs in the fourth quarter of 2010, globally.
• Mobile data traffic is forecast to grow by a factor of 26 over the next five years, according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index.
• It took about 10 years for electronic commerce to reach five percent of all US retail sales activity. Meeker posits that mCommerce (mobile commerce) will reach the same level of penetration much faster.
• Desktop Internet units (mostly computers) topped one billion in 2000 after being introduced in the 1980s. Meeker forecasts mobile Internet devices will surpass 10 billion units in less than 10 years.
• Real-time features of social networking such as music sharing and location sharing are accelerating mobile device usage.

Insurance marketers, many of whom are still catching up with social networking (as well as older technology such as Web sites), now face another significant change. Business partners and consumers will be using new mobile technology devices (smartphones, tablet computers, book readers, car-based Web systems) to search, learn, interact and buy.

One insurance marketer catching the wave is Humana, which recently announced new services for a highly mobile consumer demographic where connecting has life-and-death implications: the U.S. military.

Meeker’s conclusion about So/Lo/Mo (social/local/mobile): “It’s going to be a fascinating decade.”

Questions for the insurance pros out there:

1. Are mobile devices insured on a homeowners policy?
2. When an exec loses his or her phone or tablet computer, how would you handle the business interruption claim and/or the identity theft risk?