The world is changing and consumer patterns are changing:

- 1.67 billion people are now online (source: Internet World Stats, June 2009.) 
- Global IP traffic will quintuple from 2008 to 2013. Overall, IP traffic will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40%, exceeding two-thirds of a zettabyte (667 exabytes).
- In 2013, the Internet will be nearly four times larger than it was in 2009.
- The second largest search engine in the world is YouTube.
- Internet video is now approximately one-third of all consumer Internet traffic, not including the amount of video exchanged through P2P file sharing.
- The sum of all forms of video (TV, video on demand, Internet, and P2P) will account for over 91% of global consumer traffic by 2013. (Source: CISCO, 2009.)
- The number of mobile broadband connections is nearly 100 million and the number of fixed broadband lines is 1.1 billion (Source: GSMA, February 2009.)
- Globally, mobile data traffic will double every year through 2013, increasing 66-fold between 2008 and 2013. Mobile data traffic will grow at a CAGR of 131% between 2008 and 2013, reaching over 2 exabytes per month by 2013.
- The number of connections on mobile phone networks has crossed the 4 billion mark worldwide in February 2009, and is expected to grow to 6 billion by 2013. 
- The number of iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
- Facebook has more than 250 million active users (more than 120 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day), Skype has 480 million, and PayPal has 75 million. (July 2009.) 
- More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook daily.
- The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females.
- The counter of total number of tweets in real time at Gigatweet in January 2010 was at 8,110,000,000.
 
As a consequence, our customer base is evolving and we cannot ignore it. Understanding consumer trends and superior customer insights are crucial to capture new growth opportunities and to adapt products and services offering to new customer needs.

 

Therefore, Telefónica has started a number of customer-related initiatives included in the Customer Insight Labs initiative, which aim is enable all parts of the business at the global, regional, and local levels to better understand customer needs and develop value proposition with real impact on the marketing and product development units in Telefónica. In order to spot and analyze emerging and future consumer patterns and trends a set of trendspotting (scouting of trends) activities have been launched. One of these activities is the Trendspotting Observatory. It is important to get updates on what is happening “on the street” that we should be aware of, to be able to contrast that with more traditional market analyses.
 
The first initiative started by the Trendspotting Observatory was a digital newsletter under the name of Telefónica Sidewalk Talk that covered customer insights on social macro and micro trends from across the world, and focused on specific topics of strategic interest to Telefónica. The scouts across the world were located is the following cities: Madrid, Barcelona, London, Berlin, Prague, Milan, New York, Los Angeles, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Bogotá, Shanghai, Seoul and Tokyo. On each report these scouts told us in an enjoyable way how they felt about the topic, informed us of the services and products they like and would potentially like and provided us with ideas for improving Telefónica’s business.