Couchsurfing: Could It Be the EHarmony of Friendship?

We have been covering AirBnb for a while, and the trend of travelers crashing on the couches of locals is surely an interesting one. Recently, Benchmark Capital funded a non-profit company in this area, which intrigued us greatly. The idea for social travel network Couchsurfing.com came in 1999 when Casey Fenton made a network of

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Oracle Succeeds in Software, Struggles in Hardware

Last week Gartner lowered growth projections for the enterprise software market because of worsening macroeconomic conditions. Worldwide spending on enterprise application software is projected to grow 4.5% over the year to $120.4 billion this year, compared with earlier estimates of 5% growth. The researcher expects enterprise resource planning (ERP) sales to remain the largest enterprise application

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HubSpot Aims for 2013 IPO

According to a study published by inbound marketer HubSpot, The State of Inbound Marketing Report, organizations that use inbound marketing channels as the preferred mode of marketing find costs per lead to be 62% lower those that prefer outbound marketing tools. Inbound marketing is also benefiting from increased adoption. The report shows that in 2011,

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Baidu, Alibaba Dominate Search and E-Commerce in China

iResearch’s statistics show that during the first quarter of 2012, China’s search engine advertising sales fell 5.2% over the quarter but grew 68.2% over the year to 5.49 billion yuan (~$0.87 billion) in Q1 2012. Baidu’s market share remained the highest last quarter, when it grew to 77.6%  from 77.3% a quarter ago. Google continued to struggle in the

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AppSense Also in the IPO Pipeline

According to the report Global Mobile Virtualization Market 2011-2015,  the global mobile virtualization market is projected to grow at an annual rate of 20.1% over that four-year period. Growth will be fueled by the increased adoption of cloud-based computing from both corporate and home users. Researchers also expect that in the coming years, cloud computing

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MindTree and Persistent Systems Represent New Wave of Indian IT Growth

The Indian IT body NASSCOM expects the IT services market in India to grow 11%-14% in 2012. Growth is projected to slow down from the previous year’s rate of 37%. The depreciating rupee has helped Indian outsourcers, which have been able to report higher earnings. But the industry continues to be plagued by the challenges of

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Marin Software Readying an IPO

In a recent report, research firm Global Industry Analysts predicted that the global online advertising market will grow to $84.8 billion by 2017. This growth is attributed to increased use of mobile, online video, and social networking advertising platforms by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and e-commerce companies.

Intel Battles ARM For Apple’s Love

Gartner estimates that in 2012, worldwide PC shipments will grow 4.4% over the year. Another report cites that growth in IP traffic will lead to increased demand for data centers. Further, analysts believe that IP traffic will triple by 2015, and lead to 50% growth in data storage needs. Growing demand for computers and data

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