Snapchat’s UK user base experienced explosive growth of 89.8% in 2016, to 11.2 million users, according to eMarketer’s latest mobile usage forecast. Strong growth will continue, and this year, Snapchat will be used by 13.6 million people, representing 31.8% of all UK smartphone users.
Instagram is a little further along its path to maturity, with its banner year of growth occurring in 2015 when its user base increased by 114.4%. Last year, there were 12.2 million UK users of the platform, and in 2017, that total will reach 14.4 million and 33.7% of all smartphone users. By 2021, Snapchat and Instagram are expected to have user bases of 18.3 million and 18.7 million respectively.
Even with such growth, though, Snapchat and Instagram will not be able to catch up with Facebook, which will continue to dominate the mobile usage category in the UK. Facebook is expected to have 30.3 million mobile users this year - representing 92.8% of all Facebook users and 71.1% of smartphone users. By 2021, the end of the forecast period, half of the entire UK population will be using Facebook on a mobile phone.
Twitter, meanwhile, has been usurped by these newer platforms. This year, its mobile user base will be 12.1 million, representing a lower total than for both Instagram and Snapchat. eMarketer expects the gap to increase throughout the forecast period as growth in Twitter’s mobile user base slows down, and by 2021, there will be an estimated 12.6 million users.
Within the smartphone category, Android will dominate in the UK with more than 57.2% of the market, followed by iOS which this year will have just over 34.2% of the market.
Automated systems and bots now generate more than half of internet traffic, forcing hosting companies to manage performance, security, and infrastructure costs at the same time. Ivan Čačija argues that business users are no longer buying only storage and computing resources, but the availability and performance of their own operations. AI will reshape both data-centre management and infrastructure requirements, while regional providers can compete through local presence, predictable costs and hybrid models. Fastserver sees its partnership with Blackwall as part of a broader shift towards an integrated platform combining infrastructure, security, traffic protection and automation.
The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has unveiled comprehensive plans to restrict children’s access to social media platforms through the proposed EU Kids Act.
Ericsson Nikola Tesla no longer views artificial intelligence solely as a tool that helps developers write code, but as part of the entire software development lifecycle. At the upcoming ENT Technology Days, taking place from 21 to 25 September, artificial intelligence will also be among the central topics.
Siniša Krajnović, PhD, President of the Management Board of ENT, sees the transformation brought about by artificial intelligence through products, internal processes, and changes in the way work itself is performed, while Jelena Jurišić, Director of Technology of the ENT Group (CTO), explains how specialized AI agents are now part of analysis, design, implementation, testing, and verification. In such a model, autonomy increases gradually, with quality control and human decision-making at critical points. At the same time, the change does not diminish the importance of engineers, but increasingly shifts their role toward architecture, domain understanding, and the management of complex automated systems.
