For Now, Advantage Cisco As Networking Sector Consolidates

In my most recent post on Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO), we observed how the company is expanding in adjacent markets through acquisitions, while its competitors, including HP and 3Com, are consolidating to attack Cisco’s core networking business. In this post, we will look at the company’s recent performance and try to gauge the impact of both the

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Ad Revenue Declines Slow For Newspaper Players

The purse strings controlling ad budgets have loosened, and for 2010, overall ad budgets in the United States are expected to grow 1.2% over the year to $368 billion. The country’s newspaper giants are already seeing numbers improve. Additionally, analysts expect that during this year, digital advertisement spending will contribute 32.5% of the total ad

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Acquisition Spree Continues In Talent SaaS

In February of last quarter, SuccessFactors (NASDAQ:SFSF) made its first acquisition move by buying Inform Business Impact, a SaaS vendor in HR, talent analytics, and workforce planning, for about $40.5 million. With its first acquisition not yet closed, SucessFactors is continuing its spree with the recent purchase of CubeTree, a social enterprise platform, for about $50 million.

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EMC, VMWare And The Cloud

According to a recent Morgan Stanley report, technology spending is beginning to grow again. After having fallen 1.8% last year, spending is poised to increase 3.2% in the current year, suggesting a return to normal spending patterns. Analysts expect that storage equipment and virtualization software will attract a bigger portion of these funds. IDC’s Worldwide

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Payroll Sector Improving

The employment situation in the Unites States is slowly improving: for the third straight month, ADP (NASDAQ:ADP) reported positive job growth. According to the company’s national employment report, private sector jobs increased by 32,000 in April, more than the 20,000 expected by economists. This is a positive sign for the payroll industry. The official report

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Comcast And Viacom Looking Up

Analysts project global ad spending to grow 2.2% during the current year, a significant improvement from the earlier projections of growth of a mere 0.9%. Growth is projected to continue at 4.1% in 2011 and 5.3% in 2012. Last year, the more developed regions of the world, that is, North America, Western Europe and Japan,

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Nokia’s Market Share Declines

According to a recent IDC report, the mobile phone market continued its recovery with about 22% growth in the first quarter of 2010. Nokia (NYSE:NOK) maintained its position as the number one vendor, but its market share declined to 36.6% from 38.4% last year. Let’s take a closer look.

iPad Components And Their Makers

The semiconductor market is in a strong recovery mode. Chipmakers Texas Instruments (NYSE:TXN), Broadcom (NASDAQ:BRCM), and Atheros (NASDAQ:ATHR) all recently reported strong results and are trading close to their 52-week highs. Also, Broadcom and Texas Instruments have design wins in the iPad, which according to PC World reached 1 million in sales this past Friday,

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