Nokia To Benefit From Samsung’s Setback?

According to Gartner, during the first quarter of 2012, worldwide sales of mobile phones to end users fell 2% over the year to 419.1 million units. The decline was attributed to slow demand in the Asia-Pacific region. Nokia lost its market leadership position, which it had held since 1998, and paved the way for Samsung to become the world’s leading mobile handset vendor. During the quarter, Samsung reported sales of 86.6 million mobile phone units, up 26% over the year. Samsung now boasts ownership of 21% of the market, compared with 16% a year ago. Nokia saw sales drop 23% over the year to 83.2 million units. The company’s market share fell from 25% a year ago to 20% during the quarter.

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Intuit Divests Non-Core Businesses

According to Intuit’s Small Business Employment Index, small and medium businesses (SMBs) in the country are witnessing weak growth in employment and compensation rates. The July Index showed that employment within SMBs grew 0.17% in the month, while average monthly compensation grew 0.3%. Revenues for SMBs have fallen 0.5% over the previous month, indicating that the market remains tough.

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Online Real Estate Market Sees Two IPOs

Although a full recovery is still far away, analysts believe that the housing market may have begun to improve. In July 2012, sales of previously occupied homes grew 2.3% over the previous month. Over the past year, house sales have increased more than 10%. Home construction is also looking up. Market researchers predict that home construction will grow 0.2% in 2012, making it the first year since 2005 to register growth in the housing market. Meanwhile, the online real estate market has already seen Zillow’s IPO, and Trulia has also filed. >>>

Ticketfly Competes with Ticketmaster

San-Francisco-based Ticketfly was founded in 2008 by Andrew Dreskin and Dan Teree. They believe themselves to be much more than an online ticket selling solution and see the company as an end-to-end, cloud-based social ticketing platform for event promoters and venues. The platform helps integrate ticketing with event website and social marketing in addition to providing analytical tools that help event promoters increase sales to their events. Event organizers can sell tickets not only through event websites, but also through social pages such as event pages on Facebook. Some analysts have called it the fastest-growing, independent ticketing and social marketing platform.

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Is Jive Hoping for a Suitor?

IDC estimates the enterprise social platforms market will be worth $4.5 billion by the year 2016. That translates to an annualized growth rate of 43% over the next four years. The market is currently dominated by bigger players such as IBM, which commands more than 40% of the market share. Other big players trying to gain a stronger foothold in the market include Google and Microsoft. Google recently released its free collaborative tool, Google Drive. Microsoft spent $1.2 billion for the acquisition of enterprise social network Yammer. The growing might of these IT giants is hurting smaller players, which are finding it difficult to attract new customers.

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Concur Executing Steadily in Fast-Growing SaaS Market

Gartner estimates that the worldwide SaaS market was worth $12.3 billion last year and projects it will grow to $14.5 billion this year. Further, IDC estimates that worldwide SaaS market revenue will grow at an annual rate of 26% over the next few years to reach $53.6 billion by 2015. IDC also projects that by 2015, SaaS will account for 73% of public cloud services revenue. Existing SaaS vendors such as Concur are gearing up for this growth.

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Groupon on a Slippery Slope

Analysts believe that consumers are beginning to feel the effects daily deals fatigue in the email in-boxes after being barraged by discount deals offered by multiple vendors multiple times a day. Benchmark Capital analyst Clayton Moran believes that “the daily deal business has run into a wall.” According to Yipit, daily deals market revenues have fallen to $134 million in July in the top 30 North American markets, down from $144 million in June. This is obviously unwelcome news for the market leader, Groupon, (Nasdaq:GRPN) which has seen its market capitalization tumble since it listed in November 2011.

Groupon’s Financials
Groupon’s Q2 performance and outlook were a big disappointment to the market. Gross billings for the quarter fell from $1.35 billion a quarter ago to $1.29 billion. Net revenues rose 45% over the year to $568.3 million but fell short of the Street’s target of $575.3 million. International revenues grew 31% over the year but fell 4% sequentially to $308.2 million as the company was severely hurt by exchange rate conditions. Groupon’s international business now accounts for 54% of revenues. Net income of $0.04 cents a share, improved from a loss of $0.35 reported a year ago and managed to surpass market expectations of $0.03 a share.
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Asana Positioning Itself to Reach Ultimate Goal of $100 Billion in Revenue

A recent report by GIA projects the global cloud-based office productivity software market to be worth $16.56 billion by 2018. The researcher estimates that growth will be driven by increased adoption of these tools by small and medium businesses and Asia-Pacific markets. Menlo Park, California–based Asana was founded in 2008 by former Facebook employees Justin Rosenstein and Dustin Moskovitz. The company is becoming a strong contender in the market segment.

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Box Eyes IPO At Unrealistic Valuation

Within the cloud computing segment, enterprise content management (ECM) is a fast-growth industry. Gartner projects that the ECM market will grow at a compounded rate of 10.1% annually to more than $5.7 billion by 2014.  Another report by researcher The Radicati Group projects that by 2016, the market will be worth $7.5 billion. Big names in the market include IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. But smaller players, such as California-based Box, are also making it big.

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More Fliers Not Translating to Higher Revenues for Online Travel Players

According to a report by the International Air Transport Association, global airline traffic grew 6.2% over the year in June 2012. But the agency expects traffic to slow in the coming quarters owing to the continuing European crisis. The depressed European market has hurt several online travel companies, which have lowered their outlooks for the current quarter.

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