LinkedIn Eyeing China for Growth

The slowing growth rate for the projected quarters has been bogging down most social media stocks. Recently, the stock market took unfavorably to the newly public social networking giant Twitter, which projected a weaker outlook on account of slowing user growth. Professional network LinkedIn fared no better when they announced a similar trend for their projections.

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IBM Re-Balancing Their Portfolio

Gartner’s recent report on worldwide IT spending estimates IT spending to grow 3.1% to $3.8 trillion in 2014. Enterprise software is expected to be the strongest growing market with spending projected to increase 6.8% to 320 billion in 2014. It is followed by a 4.5% growth in IT services to $963 billion. Spending on devices is projected to grow 4.3% this year to $697 billion while data center systems are projected to grow 2.6% to $143 billion. Telecom services will be the slowest growth segment with the market growing 1.2% to $1,653 billion.

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Fat Startup Delphix Growing Rapidly

According to a recent report by IDC, the global big data market is projected to grow 6 times faster than the IT market to be worth $16.1 billion this year. Within big data, the infrastructure market is expected to be the highest growing segment and will account for 45% of the market this year. Services account for 29% and software contribute 24% of the big data market.

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Twitter’s Strategy For Addressing Slowing User Growth

Last week Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) announced results for their fourth quarter – the first result announcement since they went public. While quarterly performance exceeded market expectations, the Street wasn’t too happy with their user metrics. Twitter is looking at improving their product to counter this slowing growth.

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Satya Nadella’s Microsoft: A Look Ahead

Last year, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) CEO, Steve Ballmer announced his plans to retire from his position at the head of Microsoft. Since then, the market has been speculating as to who would step next into the shoes to become the third CEO of the tech giant. The question was answered recently, when Microsoft announced the ascension of Satya Nadella to the post of CEO.

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Application Performance Monitoring Industry IPOs Heating Up

The $2.12 billion application performance monitoring industry is looking at quite a few IPOs this year. Recently, we looked at AppDynamics which was evaluating a possible IPO. Here is a quick insight into another player in the industry, New Relic, which is also headed down the IPO route.

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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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