2014 – The year Mobile takes the internet to new places?

The CEO of Yahoo has suggested that this year the internet will evolve and take us to new places.

For retailers this is such an important factor to take into account – The internet is here to stay and it will only get stronger and more exciting.

All retailers MUST embrace the internet and all it has to offer.

Mobile is the key growth area – with more mobile devices (Smartphones and Tablets), better WiFi connections and faster processors – more and more customers will not only browse online, but they will shop more and more online.

As a retailer you must get your business “internet” ready and start to benefit from all that is digital

Here is the story from Yahoo and CNBC:

Marissa Mayer, chief executive of Yahoo, has said that 2014 will be a “tipping point” for the evolution of the Internet.

This year is one of the most important ever for the Internet and technology, according to Mayer. “Really fundamental things are happening,” she said in a debate about the future of the digital economy at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“When you look at mobile, when you look at the bandwidth, when you look at the Internet of things, it’s going to change everyone’s daily routines really fundamentally,” she added.

“By the end of this year we (Yahoo) will have more mobile traffic than PC traffic,” she said.

Back in 2010, internet research firm Comscore predicted that mobile users would surpass desktop users within five years, utilizing data available from Morgan Stanley.

The Yahoo CEO also told delegates at the World Economic Forum said that the current data privacy situation is “murky” and called for a global debate on transparency following revelations of data monitoring by the National Security Agency (NSA), together with other panelists including John T. Chambers, chairman and chief executive of technology company Cisco, Randall L.Stephenson, chairman and chief executive of telecoms companyAT&T, and Gavin Patterson, chief executive of U.K. telecoms company BT.

“When you go through security at the airport, when you sign up for a driver’s license, you know exactly what you getting from the government in exchange,” she said.

“I think that’s what’s murky…people don’t know what information is being collected and how it’s being used. And that’s the transparency that we are asking for and trying to awaken a debate on.”

There will never be 100 percent privacy for consumers, the panel said, because of the need for some government monitoring to investigate criminality. Mark Benioff, chief executive ofSalesforce.com, the online recruiter, said that the future would probably involve an “opt-in transparency.”

—By CNBC’s Catherine Boyle