Want to know what is happening on the web and trump all your friends at dinner with insightful and considered opinions? Well think of the following link as the patient zero outbreak monkey as this will dominate the links and traffic across Twitter and other info sources for the next few weeks.

The uber financial tech wizard that is Mary Meeker has released her annual trend report and as ever it is well worth a perusal. Here is the full presentation video (and she talks like she is making money) but if you want to skim the slides at your own leisure then click here

• Straight off it hammers home that it really is a global internet and that the US stranglehold is under threat.
• The continued and ever more apparent power of mobile.
• Sound is going to be bigger than video… ‘Record’ is the new QWERTY

YT merch store:

YT drives 800 million unique users through its video doors every month and now as well as being able to watch the band you will soon be able to buy the band. Or the t-shirts and songs at the very least. YT Merch will be powered by Topspin for the physical merchandise, SongKick will handle to ticket sales for concerts and Amazon / iTunes will provide the music downloads. No doubt similar partner deals are being struck in other markets. But a great sign of how things are changing and the idea that every contact point is becoming an opportunity to buy and one imagines this will spread to other channel areas beyond music. Could this be the rebirth of Froogle?!?.

Tech tip:

If you have bought a new iPhone 4S and are loving your new “humble servant” Siri and want it to start tweeting for you, want no more. Create a contact in your address book with the number 40404 and name it Twitter. Then every time you want to speak a tweet say “Siri, text Twitter” followed by your message.

Grad Corner:

In Grad Corner this week we are continuing to look not just at how our digital natives view the web but also at how the Grad Scheme is developing through the eyes of another one of them, [Sam] (http://bit.ly/meetSam)

Random:

It wasn’t all bad with BlackBerry going offline for a short while, in Dubai, while Blackberries were offline, traffic accidents fell 20% from their average rates. And in Abu Dhabi the Police Director told the National paper "accidents were reduced by 40 per cent and the fact that BlackBerry services were down definitely contributed to that". The stay safe moral of this one is don’t text / email and drive it is in fact phenomenally stupid and dangerous.