Blue Nile Experimenting with Online to Offline Model

According to a Research and Markets report, the global jewelry market is projected to grow 5% annually to be worth $257 billion in 2017. The online fine jewelry market accounts for 4%–5% of this market and is expected to grow at a much faster rate to be worth 10% of the market share by 2020.
>>>

Featured Videos

Billion Dollar Unicorns: Hike is the Latest Entrant from India

According to eMarketer, the global mobile phone messaging apps user base grew 32% over the year to 1.4 billion consumers in 2015 and is expected to grow to 2.19 billion users by the year 2019. Over-the-top (OTT) mobile messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat, have shown heavy usage in Asia-Pacific, which accounts for 58% of the world’s messaging app population. Latin America has the biggest usage with 68.1% of mobile internet users using a mobile messaging app once a month. India’s home-grown service Hike is the latest member to join the Billion Dollar Unicorn club in the sector.

>>>

Salesforce’s Buying Spree

The year 2016 has seen the valuations of quite a few cloud companies drop as they’re unable to grow at quite the frantic pace that investors demand. But bigger companies like Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) are milking this opportunity by going on a buying spree. >>>

2016 IPO Prospects: The Trade Desk Files to List

According to eMarketer, digital ad spending will surpass TV ad spending by 2017. TV ad spending is expected to grow to $72.01 billion in the US by 2017 while the total digital ad spending will grow to $77.37 billion. By 2020, digital ad spending in the US is projected to grow to $105.21 billion.

>>>

Billion Dollar Unicorns: Liepin, China’s Homegrown Recruitment Platform

According to Analysys International, China’s online recruitment industry grew 31% over the year in the fourth quarter of 2015 to RMB 1.24 billion (~$200 million). Sequentially, the market grew 12% over the quarter. The high growth market is helping create new Billion Dollar Unicorn members. One such player is executive talent focused Liepin.com. >>>

Nutanix Delays IPO

In December last year, hyperconverged storage provider and Billion Dollar Unicorn club member Nutanix filed to go public. The company was expecting to go public earlier this year. But given the weak market conditions, it has still not listed. Many in the technology sector are waiting for it to go public to determine what the IPO markets really look like.

>>>

Talend Has a Strong IPO

Open source integration software vendor Talend has gone against the trend. In what has been seen as a tough market for IPOs, Talend had a strong IPO. It opened trading on the NASDAQ exchange under the ticker TLND at $27.66 after pricing its IPO at $18 and raising $94.5 million. >>>

Workday Expanding Through Acquisitions

According to a Gartner report published earlier this year, the global cloud application services, which consists of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings, is expected to grow 20% this year to $37.7 billion. The market is estimated to have grown 16% in 2015 to $31.4 billion. This growth is attributed to the shift in the models of software vendors who are transitioning from on-premises licensed software to public cloud-based offerings. SaaS-based enterprise application services provider Workday (NYSE: WDAY) is already seeing the benefits of this growth. While the transition is old news at this point, the metrics of this shift are staggering.

>>>

From Unicorn to Unicorpse: One Kings Lane Goes For A Song

The flash sales or discount sites sector was once a cool sector that saw several billion dollar unicorns like Groupon, Gilt Groupe, LivingSocial, and Zulily. But as the sector’s appeal fades, these unicorns are turning into unicorpses*. The latest addition to the unicorpse list is One Kings Lane, which was recently bought by Bed, Bath & Beyond for $30 million, a mere 3% of its peak valuation of $912 million in 2014. >>>

2016 IPO Prospects: Uber Eyeing Self-Driving

According to eMarketer, 15 million US adults are expected to use ride-sharing services, a 20.5% y-o-y increase. However, the sector is maturing with no more booming growth rates. While the segment is expected to grow through 2020, the rate of growth is expected to shrink to single digits by 2018. >>>