Online video streaming services provider Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) is continuing to see strong growth. According to a comScore report, nearly 42% of US households were subscribed to a paying video streaming service as of August 2014. Netflix was the market leader with 32% of total households as its subscribers. Amazon came a distant second with 19% households subscribing to their Instant Video service. Hulu Plus was the third largest player with a mere 9% of households.
It is all about the cloud within the technology sector. And the biggest news so far is the possible sale of Salesforce.com. In a surprising move, it appears that Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is evaluating a bid for the giant.
Facebook (Nasdaq: FB) recently announced mixed results for their latest quarter. While they managed to surpass market expectations on earnings, revenues were a different story. That has not stopped Facebook from continuing to add to their arsenal of revenue-generating opportunities.
The eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY)–PayPal spin off is nearing its time. During their last days together, PayPal has helped eBay deliver strong results. The rest of their business reported year-over-year decline, but the payment business continued to deliver strong performance.
Continuing with our coverage of Billion Dollar Unicorns and possible contenders, here is the interesting story of BlackLine – a company that offers scalable applications to automate financial closing and other accounting processes.
There aren’t many Billion Dollar Unicorn companies coming out of India. But here is an interesting story of restaurant search and discovery portal Zomato, which is showing remarkable growth both within and outside the country.
An IDC conference conducted in December 2014 on Worldwide Big Data and Analytics revealed some interesting statistics. According to the researcher, visual data discovery tools are projected to grow 2.5 times faster than the rest of the business intelligence market, and by 2018 this segment will become a requirement for all enterprises. IDC estimates spending on cloud-based Big Data and analytics to grow three times faster than spending for on-premise solutions. It expects decision management platforms to grow 60% annually 2019. Billion Dollar Unicorn club contender GoodData has established a strong presence in this market.
The recently ended quarter did not bring in much good news for Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), again. This was the sixth consecutive quarter that Google’s earnings missed market expectations. Things don’t seem to be improving in the near future. The recent Yahoo and Firefox agreement has hurt Google as their US search share slipped to the lowest since 2012 to 64.4% in March this year. Additionally, Google’s continued investments in R&D to experiment with new offerings and recent antitrust claims filed by EU are making things difficult for them.
A new report by BI Intelligence suggests that social media ad spending in the US will grow from $6.1 billion in 2013 to $14 billion by 2018. The growth in this ad spend is creating a big need for players like Billion Dollar Unicorn club contender Hootsuite that help companies manage their social media marketing better.
Yahoo’s (Nasdaq: YHOO) Marissa Mayer just can’t seem to figure out an operational turnaround. Earlier this week, Yahoo reported their first quarter results for the year and they continued to disappoint the market. Some may argue that since Mayer took over the reins, Yahoo’s stock has nearly tripled. But the growth in the stock is really attributed to their high performing investments in Asia. Yahoo owns 24% stake in Alibaba and 35% stake in Yahoo Japan.