Mind blowing stats just in from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

by | Mar 6, 2015 | Digital, Science, Research + Technology

I love discovering great data. Check out these impressive stats just in from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. One of the most impressive stats may just be the attendance at the event–over 93,000 people!

The future looks awesome.

1. Mobile World Congress’ governing body, the GSMA, issued a report here on Thursday, forecasting that the number of mobile subscribers in the world will jump by 1 billion in the next five years. That will put the mobile-phone crowd at 4.6 billion.

2. If you counted all of the people with smartphones who are shopping at Walmart stores right now, like a city population, “Walmartville” would be bigger than San Francisco proper. Mobile tech company xAd gave Adweek an intriguing product demo Wednesday, providing a glimpse into how 170 brands are employing its data platform. At 10:15 a.m. ET, we could see there were exactly 921,366 smartphone-carrying people in Walmart stores.

3. Line, a millennial-happy mobile app from Japan, gains 1.7 million new users every day—thanks largely to countless emojis and stickers that actually make marketers money. Even Sir Paul McCartney has skin in the Line game.

4. An Amazon spokesman told CNET that the e-commerce giant’s Appstore now has roughly 400,000 apps globally—or 100,000 more than it had just last fall.

5. Nissan-Renault’s electric car division owes 33 percent of its U.S. sales to Atlanta alone. The car brand participated in an Internet of Things panel that also predicted 75 percent of automobiles shipped in 2020 would have Web connectivity.

6. The same Internet of Things presentation included research that prognosticates there will be 190 million smart home devices shipped in 2018. That’s a staggering increase when you consider only 25 million were sold in 2013.

7. On Monday, Mario Zanotti, senior evp of Latin America for Millicom, said his company’s mobile data users spiked 30 percent in the past few months in Paraguay thanks to Internet.org, the Facebook-led initiative trying to bring the Internet to developing nations.

8. Lee McCabe, global head of travel for Facebook, said 79 percent of smartphone users have their phones within arm’s reach for all but three hours of the day. McCabe added that such folks average 2 hours and 42 minutes a day on their iPhones or Samsungs.

9. Speaking on the same panel earlier this week, Joff Redfern, LinkedIn vp of mobile product, said that four years ago, only 8 percent of the networking site’s traffic came via mobile devices. That number now stands at 50 percent, Redfern said.

10. $6,400. In case you weren’t aware that there is a luxury smartphone category, that’s how many American dollars you’d have to pay for a Lamborghini 88 Tauri. What the what?