Boingo In A Tough Business

According to a report by Cisco, global mobile data traffic grew 2.6 times in 2010. Last year, mobile data traffic recorded data flow of 237 petabytes per month. Mobile video traffic accounted for 49.8% of total mobile traffic last year and is projected to grow to 52.8% in the current year. The growth was seen across smartphones and other handheld devices, and average smartphone usage doubled in 2010 to 79 megabytes per month. Tablets have also become a big user, with more than 3 million tablets connecting to the mobile network last year and each tablet generating five times more traffic than the average smartphone. The report further estimates that 94 million laptops were on the mobile network in 2010, generating traffic of 1.7 gigabytes per month. >>>

Featured Videos

Fusion-io In The IPO Pipeline

Today, the VC-funded startup market is full of Internet companies that command sky-high valuations without a robust monetization strategy in place. However, there are also organizations such as Fusion-io that are able to support valuations and IPO plans with a sound product strategy. The company, which was ranked Number 2 by The Wall Street Journal out of the top 50 venture-backed companies last year, recently announced plans to go public. Here is a brief review of a company that has, to date, shipped more than 20 petabytes of flash memory to more than 1,000 organizations.

>>>

Competition In Learning Management Heats Up

In my most recent post on the talent management sector, I said that talent management companies were increasingly leaning toward learning systems. Taleo (NASDAQ:TLEO) acquired Learn.com and another talent management vendor, SumTotal Systems, acquired Learn.com’s rival, GeoLearning. All these acquisitions in the learning space had left SuccessFactors (NASDAQ:SFSF) with no learning partner and forced the company to make its own acquisition in the space. Let’s take a closer look.

>>>

Is Cisco’s Restructuring Too Little, Too Late?

Government spending during the quarter is estimated to have fallen 8% over the year – not good news for Cisco, which gets 22% of its revenues from the sector and is already seeing troubled times. The company’s stock price fell 15% last year. During the current year, while the Dow Jones has gone up 10%, Cisco’s stock is among the worst performers, having recorded a 12% drop in the year. Recently, CEO John Chambers accepted Cisco’s failings and has stepped up effort to pull the company back on track.

>>>

Pandora’s Scaling Issues

According to the Recording Industry Association of America, the money spent per capita on recorded music for the U.S. fell from $71 in 1999 to $26 in 2009. Digital music services such as single song and album downloads, subscriptions, online radio stations, and mobile phone downloads fundamentally changed the way the industry worked, beginning around 2003. By 2009, Internet and satellite radio was earning close to $0.2 billion in revenues and single song downloads were accounting for over $1.2 billion in revenues. >>>

In A Wise Move, ADP Enters Healthcare IT

Unemployment rates in the country inched up marginally from 8.8% in March to 9.0% in April. Despite this only slight increase, the unemployment rate was 0.8% higher than in November. ADP’s report on non-farm payroll recorded the creation of 179,000 jobs in the private sector in April, which is significantly lower than February’s job gains of 217,000 and March’s gains of 207,000. Over the first four months of 2011, an average 196,000 private sector jobs have been created in the United States.

>>>

Angie’s List Trying To Scale

Over the past decade, the growing importance of niche communities in today’s business dynamics has become increasingly clear. Local search and classifieds have helped address the needs of these communities. While Yelp remains a leader in leveraging user-generated content, Angie’s List has also established itself as a strong contender, albeit with a slightly different focus. Angies’s List was founded in 1995 in Ohio by Angie Hicks and William Oesterle as a website to list actual customer reviews of various local service providers. Service professionals including doctors, plumbers, contractors, and others in more than 500 categories are rated by customers in a report card–style review. Based on the reviews, the service publishes an overall grade for the service provider to help future customers make decisions about which service to use.

>>>

Flipboard’s Valuation Without Monetization Strategy

Over the past few months, we have looked at many new Web-based companies that have managed to deliver sky-high valuations without supporting revenues.  Flipboard is one more such company: It has a service that users like, but it has yet to figure out a successful monetization strategy.

>>>

EBay Expanding Its International Footprint

According to a Forrester market report for 2010, worldwide online retail sales last year were worth $439 billion and accounted for 5% of all retail sales. Online retail sales are expected to grow to $536 billion by 2012 and will account for 12% of overall sales. The report estimates the U.S. market to grow to $279 billion in 2015 from $179 billion in 2010 and the Western European market to grow 11% to $156 billion in 2014 from $93 billion in 2009. Within Asia-Pacific, Japan’s market was estimated to be worth $45 billion in online retail sales in 2010, and China was estimated to reach $49bn in 2010 with a growth rate double of that of Europe. It is little surprise that online retailer, eBay, is focusing on international expansion.

>>>

Netflix In A Formidable Position

NPD Group’s latest VideoWatch Digital tracking report found that Netflix commanded a 61% market share of the movie/TV streaming and downloads market in the U.S.. Comcast ran a distant second with 8%, followed by DirecTV, Time Warner Cable and Apple each claiming a 4% share. According to the report, digital video now accounts for nearly 25% of all video volume at home. In the recently reported quarterly results, with 22.8 million U.S. subscribers, online streaming and DVD rental provider, Netflix, has become bigger than Comcast, the country’s largest cable TV provider.

>>>