Where the Internet Is Going – Can Insurance Keep Up?

If I say the name Mary Meeker, what do you think?  She was one of the luminous equity analysts during the gilded dot.com age which now seems so long ago.  I met her in the late 90’s and was favorably impressed by her intelligence, knowledge, and no-nonsense attitude.  She loaned me the only copy of a report she had and trusted me to get it back to her by the end of the conference…so her judgment can’t be all bad either (yes, she got her report back).  Her reputation was sullied when media types began casting about for villains to fit their morality tales about the dot.com meltdown, but little of the mud stuck because she was guilty of nothing more than evangelizing for an industry she believed in. 

Mary continues to analyze and write for Morgan Stanley.  Her latest five-year prognostication (along with some good current metrics) on the Internet is now available, and I’d say it’s required reading for insurance technology types who want to know where the waves are going in order to be able to ride them.  If you want a summary of her report, check out Alacra’s Barry Graubart here.  If you want to dive directly into her 147-slide Economy + Internet Trends, here you go. 

Not only do I hope insurance technology will keep up with the Internet, I hope it will fully leverage the platform, the software, the computer, and the tool…that the Internet is.

Speaking of thought-stimulating presentations, many of you saw the YouTube classic Shift Happens a year or two ago but you may want to check out the most current version: Did You Know 3.0  Alvin Toffler coined the term Future Shock with his book of the same name forty years ago…but the future keeps shocking us.

Tags: Insurance technology, Internet