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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Has Zynga Lost its Charm?

According to the 2014 Global Games Market Report by Newzoo, global game revenues are projected to grow 8% in 2014 to $81.5 billion. The market will be dominated by growth in the Asia Pacific and Latin America regions. Asia Pacific revenues will see their share increase from 42% in 2013 to 45% this year. Latin-America’s shares will grow 14% and will account for $3.3 billion revenues. The growth in these markets is attributed to improving Internet penetration and an increasing adoption of mobile devices in the regions. However, Zynga continues to struggle. >>>

Yahoo’s Aimless Shopping Spree Continues

For the recently ended quarter, Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO), surprisingly, reported results that beat the market’s expectations. Since Ms. Mayer took over as the CEO of Yahoo, she has been focusing on building Yahoo through acquisitions. Most of their acquisitions are focused on adding talent and the market remains puzzled about their ability to monetize these deals. Things could become bleaker as Yahoo is expected to step up its already high speed acquisition spree with the $5 billion it got from the sale of Alibaba’s stock.

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LinkedIn Builds A Significant Media Business

According to an eMarketer report published earlier this year, the US social network ad revenues are projected to grow 31% this year to $5.82 billion. Social networking giant Facebook remains the advertising leader with an estimated $3.95 billion in revenues. Twitter is a distant second with ad revenues from the US growing 88% this year to $790.5 million. Professional network LinkedIn is expected to be the third largest player with US ad revenues growing 40% to $327 million. eMarketer expects LinkedIn’s ad revenues to grow 38% next year to $450.2 million.

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Facebook Has No Plans of Holding Back on Investments

According to a MarketsnMarkets report on Cross-Platform & Mobile Advertising Market, the global mobile advertising market is projected to grow 38% annually over the five-year period from 2013 through 2018. The industry is projected to grow from $15.13 billion in 2013 to $76.57 billion in 2018. The growth is driven by the emerging markets of Middle East, Africa, and Latin America and is attributed to the continued increase of smartphone usage and the increased integration of cross-device platforms that targets audiences on multiple devices such as desktops and mobile devices.

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