SAP Eyes Cloud and Mobile Spend

SAP (NYSE: SAP) ended the year 2015 with a bang, surpassing all market expectations and causing its stock to touch 52-week high levels. But if the market was expecting a similar performance for the first quarter of the year, it was disappointed. The company reported rather lackluster results, following the footsteps of most of the other tech giants. Its recent investments in the Cloud and Mobile space are expected to improve its performance.

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eBay Getting Into Wine

The market hasn’t been too pleased with eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) lately after it hived off PayPal as an independent company. Over the past few quarters, eBay has been delivering lackluster performance for its e-commerce division and has failed to keep pace with e-tail giant Amazon. To make matters worse, the company is facing increasing competition from newer and smaller niche players like Etsy and Poshmark and has also suffered from its vulnerability to Google’s algorithm changes in the recent past. But the recent quarter’s results suggest that all is not lost.

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Billion Dollar Unicorns: Square Post Its IPO

According to eMarketer, mobile payments in the US are estimated to grow 210% to $27.05 billion in 2016 from $8.71 billion in 2015. The number of people in the US using proximity mobile payments is expected to grow 61.8% to 37.5 million by 2016. Square became a Billion Dollar Unicorn raising funds on ridiculously high valuations, but it recently went public that halved its valuation to a more realistic level. >>>

Billion Dollar Unicorns: Age of Learning Monetizing in Educational Apps

According to a ReportsnReports report, the global education gamification market is estimated to grow 64% annually over the period 2014 through 2019. Gamification within education refers to a process of implementing game mechanics into non-gaming context so that users are engaged and are able to solve problems. It involves the appointment of points, badges, challenges, a leaderboard, and rewards as part of this strategy. Within education, gamification strategies lead to users learning concepts through game techniques. Age of Learning is a recent entrant to the Billion Dollar Unicorn club that is using these techniques to developed apps focused on a niche group.

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2016 IPO Prospects: NantHealth Testing the IPO Markets, Yet Again

According to a recent report by Grand View Research Inc., the global molecular diagnostics market size is expected to reach $8.02 billion by 2020 driven by the increasing prevalence of infectious and cardiovascular diseases along with rising geriatric population.

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Market Losing Patience with Tableau Software

Investors appear to be losing confidence in data visualization vendor Tableau Software (NYSE: DATA). The company recently announced better than expected results for its first quarter. But that did not stop the stock from falling 11% in a single day.

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Energy Recovery Continues to Grow

According to a ResearchAndMarkets report, currently only 1% of the global population receives water from desalination projects. The United Nations expects that percentage to grow to 14% by 2025. Water desalination vendor Energy Recovery Inc. (ERI) (NASDAQ: ERII) is perfectly positioned to fuel this growth. But it is not only water desalination that the company is now focused on. It is also exploring and succeeding in the oil and gas segment, which includes gas processing, chemical processing, and hydraulic fracturing – a market that it estimates could account for $369 million a year in recurring opportunity. >>>

ServiceNow Recovers

According to IDC, worldwide spending on public cloud services is expected to grow at a 19.4% CAGR or almost six times the rate of overall IT spending growth. It is expected to grow from nearly $70 billion in 2015 to more than $141 billion in 2019. >>>

2016 IPO Prospects: The Honest Company Makes the Online to Offline Model Work

According to a report by Grand View Research, the market for global organic personal care products was estimated at $8.43 billion in 2013. Driven by increasing customer awareness about organic products, this market is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years. In North America, the organic personal care product market was estimated to be worth more than $2.5 billion in 2012 and is expected to grow to nearly $5.5 billion by the year 2020. Jessica Alba’s The Honest Company is an IPO prospect from this market. >>>

IBM Focuses on Blockchain Technology

For the recently reported quarterly results, IBM’s (NYSE: IBM) restructuring continued to translate into declining revenues. This was the sixteenth straight quarter of declining revenues for IBM. Analysts believe that the trend will continue through the end of the year as IBM continues to reorganize its portfolio to move away from computer hardware sales to focus on “strategic imperatives”, which include the cloud, analytics, and mobile computing focused businesses in multiple sectors including healthcare and financial services.

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