Morgan Stanley's Meeker Sees Online Ad Boom

(page 2 of 2)

Some of Meeker's current thinking was outlined in her Mobile Internet Report, a 424-page tome published last year, the culmination of four years of research.

Yuri Milner, chairman of Russian Internet company Mail.ru Group Ltd., calls it "the best of what's been written in this field." Mail.ru raised $912 million this month on the London Stock Exchange with Morgan Stanley among the arrangers.

Meeker, an Indiana native who graduated from DePauw University and earned an MBA from Cornell University, says she draws on personal experience, as well as data analysis and company research, to form her views.

Scottish 'Epiphany'

She says she had an "epiphany" last year after a three- hour hike on the coast of Scotland, near St. Andrews. A friend who accompanied her on the hike used a Research In Motion Ltd. BlackBerry to snap photos and had posted them to Facebook by the time Meeker returned to her lodging.

"We could get to a point where a very material portion of content on the Internet is created on Facebook with mobile devices," said Meeker, who spends much of her time in New York, and has a home in Woodside, in California's Silicon Valley.

Another realization came during a recent plane ride between Washington and New York. In an informal survey of fellow first- class passengers, Meeker found four iPad tablet computers, including her own, and surmised that business users are adopting the iPad more quickly than she had expected. Besides the iPad, Meeker also boasts a Macintosh, two PCs that run Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system, an iPhone, an Amazon Kindle e- reader, and several iPod music players.

Executives of companies covered by Meeker say her research is as probing now as it was more than a decade ago.

3 a.m. Calls

Ken Goldman was chief financial officer of Excite At Home Corp., a Redwood City, California-based Internet-service provider Meeker covered. He recalls receiving phone calls at home at midnight from Meeker in New York, where it was 3 a.m.

"I used to dread those calls, actually," he said. "It was never a 10-minute call; it lasted 45 minutes to an hour."

Goldman now is CFO of security software maker Fortinet Inc., which went public last year with Morgan Stanley as an underwriter.

This year marks the seventh-straight year Meeker is speaking at the Web 2.0 conference. She packs a lot into her 10- minute presentation, said John Battelle, executive producer of the Web 2.0 Summit. Last year, she plowed through 75 slides in the time most presenters to cover a dozen, he said.

"The funny thing about Mary is, every year, she tries to deliver more slides in the same amount of time," Battelle said. "She may have mellowed a little bit over the years, but not much."

Kharif is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek in Portland, Ore.

Business Exchange

Track and share business topics across the Web.