Amazon’s Riding High on the Cloud

According to last quarter’s report on the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) by Synergy Research Group, Amazon Web Service (AWS) maintained their lead in the market. While Microsoft’s Azure, Google, and IBM are catching up, they still have a long way to go. Synergy estimates that the total IaaS/PaaS market grew 52% last quarter to $3 billion. During the same period, Amazon grew 65% over the year and increased their worldwide market share to over 30%.

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Facebook Delivering on Mobile

If there is one company that has figured out the mantra to mobile engagement and monetization, that is Facebook (Nasdaq: FB). The company recently reported impressive fourth quarter results that not only silenced all skeptics, but also helped drive their stock to a record high. After their initial IPO debacle, the company has surely figured out its way, with Zuckerberg maturing steadily at the helm.

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There Is No Stopping Google

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), for the first half of the previous year, internet advertising sales grew 18% over the year to $20.1 billion. Mobile advertising continues to report strong growth with revenues from the segment growing 145% to $3 billion. Digital video advertising grew 24% to $1.3 billion in the first half of 2013 while search revenues grew 7% to $8.7 billion. Display-related advertising revenues were up 30% to $6.1 billion.

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Yahoo Should Acquire Airpush

Yahoo’s Merissa Mayer may have failed to deliver strong results for Yahoo, but she managed to drive improved user metrics at least on desktop visits. A recent comScore report on desktop web properties revealed that within the U.S., Yahoo received 195.16 million unique desktop visitors in December. Surprisingly, Yahoo outranked Google which came in second with 192.3 million unique U.S. desktop visitors and Microsoft which received 175.3 million unique visitors.

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AppDynamics On The IPO Pipeline

According to a Gartner report, the application performance monitoring (APM) market was estimated to grow 5.4% from $2.01 billion in 2012 to $2.12 billion by the end of 2013. Another research conducted by TRAC on over 600 IT and business professionals revealed that 71% of the organizations surveyed were using multiple solutions to address issues related with application performance.

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Netflix Looking at International to Drive Growth, Margins Face Risk

According to Juniper Research, the market from streaming and downloading services in the country was expected to be more than $4.5 billion last year. Giants like Netflix and Amazon are looking to grow their presence in Europe and Latin American markets. Recently, Wal-mart’s video streaming service, Vudu also expanded their operations in Mexico while continuing to explore opportunities in Europe and Asia.

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Apple’s Growth will Come from China

According to a report from Gartner, Android-based smartphones and tablets will account for 1.1 billion devices worldwide in 2014, recording a growth of 26% over the year. Total shipments of PCs, tablets, smartphones, and mobile phones will grow 7.6% this year to 2.5 billion units. Gartner also estimates that by 2017, emerging markets will account for more than 75% of Android’s sales volume. Apple’s iOS and MacOS devices will grow 29% to 344 million units while Windows mobile and PC operating systems will grow 10% to 360 million devices this year.

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Microsoft Counting on Azure and Surface

According to the latest Gartner report, Worldwide PC shipments for the fourth quarter of the previous year fell 6.9% to 82.6 million units, making it the seventh consecutive quarter of shipment decline. Despite the holiday season quarter, the researcher found that while sales of technology products in the U.S. and EMEA markets grew, the spending was more focused on tablets. PC sales in the U.S. fell 7.5% to 15.8 million units and in EMEA fell 6.7% to 25.8 million units.

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Where Will eBay’s Growth Come From?

A recent Forrester report on US online retail sales projected online holiday sales to grow 15% over the year to $78 billion spurred by the availability of features like free shipping, deals and discounts. That may still be a conservative estimate when one compares National Retail Federation’s projections of online holiday sales to grow to $82 billion. In reality, on Black Friday, according to an IBM research, web sales grew 21% over the year as retailers like Amazon and eBay both “siphoned consumers from brick-and-mortar stores”. But surprisingly, eBay’s (Nasdaq: EBAY)  recent quarter’s bigger news was driven by their payment segment business, PayPal.

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BlackBerry Counting on the Emerging Markets

If BlackBerry (Nasdaq: BBRY) was hoping that a name change would improve their performance, then they must have been disappointed so far. But things seem to be improving a bit in the new year. Recently, Pentagon announced plans to purchase 80,000 BlackBerry smartphones as BlackBerry continues to be known as the most secure mobile phone in the market. The new announcement has helped improve their stock price, which had fallen more than 35% last year.

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