Geolocation services are becoming one of the next hot things in the social marketing space. While players such as foursquare and Gowalla are dedicated providers of geolocation-based marketing services, bigger players, including Google and Facebook have, have entered the space with their own offerings – Google Places and Facebook Places.
Today, viewers can watch online video content free on sites such as Google’s YouTube or by accessing a subscription-based service such as Netflix or Hulu Plus. While analysts believe that the availability of content in this way has led to cord-cutting and trouble for traditional cable companies, the recent financial performance of leading cable players like
The U.S. social gaming market is expected to grow at 28% in the current year to $1.1 billion and another 21% in 2012 to reach $1.32 billion. Zynga leads the segment with more than 360 million users accessing its gaming properties. But smaller players such as CrowdStar are giving it worthwhile competition.
Gartner projects worldwide mobile gaming market to reach $11.4 billion by 2014. The mobile gaming market is estimated to have grown 19% over the year in 2010 to cross $5.6 billion in revenues. Gartner’s report estimates that 70% to 80% of all mobile app downloads are mobile games. Further, 60% to 70% of those downloaded
Epocrates (NASDAQ:EPOC) was founded in 1998 by two Stanford students as a means to ease doctors’ burden of carrying around books to look up drug information, drug interactions, and dosing information. Since then, the company has transformed itself into a leading provider of clinical information and solutions to healthcare providers. It boasts of a network of
The EDA industry is finally seeing some much-needed action. Carl Icahn, the largest shareholder in Mentor Graphics (NASDAQ:MENT), realizes the importance of consolidation in the industry and believes that Mentor needs to be merged with another player, a move that could cut costs significantly. Several years ago, I had proposed the same thing.
One of the decade’s major trends in vertical and local Web that I identified earlier was the growing importance and popularity of high-quality, specialized, niche content. OpenTable (NASDAQ:OPEN), the online restaurant reservation solution provider, seems to have fully understood this trend and how to take advantage of it.
Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL) last week reported a strong quarter that beat analyst estimates. Increased spending on cloud computing by companies in many industries has been beneficial to Oracle, which entered the more difficult server business with its acquisition of Sun. Let’s take a closer look.