Interleaved between the company presentations which comprised 90% of the Goldman Sachs Internet Conference were several panels and data presentations, including a presentation of Goldman’s latest survey among a broad sample weighted to reflect the general Internet population. Much of the data was unsurprising, but I will list below a few of the more interesting data points:

· If you look at the top online activities based on time spent, these activities appear fairly stabilized across 2005-2008. Email hovers around 26%, Search at 14%, Games at 11%, and Reading News at 10%. This seems incredibly boring when viewed at this level, in spite of a rash of startup activity touching each of these areas in various ways.

· Watching videos online is the fastest growing category of online activity, but viewing habits are already starting to look an awful lot like the way people watch TV today.

· The proportion of respondents who just go directly to a website of interest instead of using search more than half the time has grown to 66% in 2008 vs. 57% in 2005.

· Like the top online activities, the top categories in online spending also appear stable over the last 4-5 years: Clothes/Apparel (48%), Books (35%), Travel Arrangements (32%), Consumer Electronics (31%) (2008 percentages, but could just as well be the 2004 or 2005 percentages).

· The top drivers of e-commerce remain Price, Ease of Use, and Product Selection. Boring, Less Boring, and Boring. (Speaking of boring: in another post I should talk about why eBay is on its way to becoming just an online Wal-mart).

· Alternative payments are growing: nearly 50% of online shoppers and 59% of heavy shoppers use alternatives like PayPal or Bill Me Later. This is one that I do find interesting—when I pulled out my wallet recently, I found myself staring at a few twenties the same way I used to look at fake Confederate money or Monopoly money when I was a kid. This was the first time that this feeling had been visceral, rather than intellectual. Weird.

· Perhaps the most interesting, obvious, and important: the top driver of mobile search choice is the quality of the interface, not relevance. In fact, concern over relevance in mobile search is less than half that shown for PC-based web searches. This may be an artifact of the press being given to the iPhone's terrific interface, but it seems a little weird, given the huge added value that relevance can have in mobile search. I am thinking of location-based relevance here, but that doesn’t appear to be on general users’ radar screens yet. I think this will change in a very big way over the next decade (yes, I said decade....). I have seen some really interesting startup activity in location-based services, and the Android demo at Google I/O offered some pretty expansive LBS possibilities. It's going to be interesting to see whether the complexities involving spectrum licensing, network carriers, device manufacturers, OS creators, third-party app developers, content creators, advertisers (and, by the way, mainstream consumers) make the rise of LBS rapid and powerful, or slow and excruciating.