Chegg Struggles to Find their Footing

According to the College Board, the average annual cost of textbooks and supplies for students has grown 50% over the last decade to $1,200 per year. Online text book rental service Chegg hopes to reduce the costs of these books by enabling students to rent out books at a more affordable price instead of purchasing them.

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OnDeck Raising Funds

According to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, since 2000, large business lending volume has grown 36% while small business lending volume has fallen 14% and micro business loans under $100,000 have reduced 33%. Further research reveals that the reduction was not on account of lack of demand, but more on account of the absence of supply as small businesses have found it harder to get approved for loans.

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The Rise of Japan’s GREE

According to Superdata Research, the global mobile gaming market is expected to generate revenues of $21.1 billion this year. It is projected to grow to $28.2 billion by the year 2016. The research study also says that mobile games account for more than a third of monthly spending among digital gamers in the US alone.

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Line Abandons IPO Plans

Earlier this year, Facebook acquired WhatsApp for a whopping $22 billion sparking interest in the mobile messaging industry. Soon after the acquisition, South Korean mobile messaging leader Line filed papers to list on the Tokyo Exchange and the NYSE earlier this fall.  The company claimed that they would much rather follow the IPO route than be sold to a bigger player. But in a surprising move, Line went back on their earlier plans and announced that they would abandon their IPO.

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Pandora’s Improving Offerings

According to a Juniper Research report on the online music streaming industry, the online music market is projected to grow from $12.3 billion this year to $13.9 billion in 2019. The analyst believes that while the market is seeing intensifying competition from bigger brand players like Apple and Google, it is not necessarily seeing a significant growth in revenues. It means that online streaming players like Pandora (NYSE:P) will have to up the volume in terms of offerings to keep attracting a bigger customer base.

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SAP Going Full Throttle On Cloud Strategy

According to market reports, end user spending on cloud services is expected to be more than $180 billion by the year 2015 and spending on cloud equipment to grow to $79.1 billion by 2018. It is estimated that by 2014, US organizations will spend more than $13 billion on cloud computing and managed hosting services.

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Lending Club’s IPO Coming Soon

The market has been waiting for the last couple of years for peer-to-peer lending platform Lending Club to go public. I had projected that they would rather wait to hit the $100 million revenue mark before listing. And looks like, they did just that.

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Yelp Counting on International Growth

According to a recent eMarketer report on the US mobile advertising market, the sector is projected to grow 82% in 2014 to $9 billion. eMarketer expects US mobile advertising to grow to $28.4 billion by the year 2018 and account for 85.9% of the US digital advertising market compared with the 39.5% share this year. Google remains the leader in the market with 68.5% market share in 2013. However, other players are eating into its share. Google’s share is projected to drop to 65.7% in 2014 and to 64.2% in 2016. The researcher predicts that local reviews site Yelp will perform impressively in the coming quarters with their market share growing from 1% in 2013 to 1.9% by 2016.

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Still No Light at the End of the Tunnel for Groupon?

Local deals site Groupon (Nasdaq: GRPN) is making very slow progress in turning themselves around. Nearly two years since they fired their founder Andrew Mason, the stock hasn’t fared significantly better. The company continues to try new ways to reignite the earlier growth and deliver the financial performance the market desires.

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No Compelling Strategy Emerging From Twitter Yet

Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) took its time in going public as it evaluated the market conditions and kept delaying their IPO till they thought the market was strong enough to handle their listing. The stock had a good run in the first few months of listing. A year since it went public, it is a different story. As growth in operational metrics slows down, the market is looking for Twitter to deliver Facebook-like monetization strategies. But for now, it appears to be a long wait ahead as models now suggest that the company may turn profitable only in 2017 and not in 2015, as projected during the IPO.

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