Samsung: Facebook Has Huge Impact On Device Sales, Electronics Industry Growth

At a press event today, Samsung Electronics gave a brief overview of some of the key technologies and driving forces that the Korean company is working on these days.

To kick off the lunch event, Vice President Jim Elliott described how mobile computing has reached a key inflection point within the electronics industry.

Mobile Computing to be 10X Desktop Computing

“We’re expecting more than 10 billion units of sales of these connected devices or mobile Internet devices over the next decade. This is an order of magnitude over the desktop Internet era which helped propelled the growth of the last decade,” said the Samsung executive.

These connected devices are GPSes, laptops, tablets, all integrated seamlessly to the cloud. “There is a tremendous amount of back-end infrastructure that is needed to drive all these connected devices seamlessly as people look more and more to the cloud to power this data transfert.”

Samsung sees Facebook driving the growth of the entire electronics industry.
 
Interestingly, for Samsung, Facebook is now the new killer app that is driving the whole electronics industry. The social network is having a huge impact on connected device sales as more than 200 million people are accessing it a mobile device. And according to Facebook, people that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active than non-mobile users.

“In the past, a lot of times it was when a new operating system launched that really spurred PC sales, now it’s social networking and particularly Facebook is so impactful on people’s usage patterns and daily lives and this is having a huge impact on infrastructure and device sales,” adds Elliott.

For the Samsung executive, social networks are also the driver for Internet usage, even more popular than e-mail!

“Think about the traffic, the load impact that this has on the Internet, on the backbone to move this around. According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index, about 31K petabytes per month needed to drive these pictures, videos… 1 petabyte is 13.3 years of HD video.”