Mobile Phone Market Movements

IDC recently reported that the worldwide mobile phone market grew 11.3% in the fourth quarter of 2009 after five consecutive quarters of decline. The smartphone market, which grew consistently even through the downturn, was up 39% in the quarter. Motorola (NYSE:MOT) returned to the top 5 smartphone vendors list, while in the mobile phone market its share declined. Samsung and LG recorded strong market share gains. >>>

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CDN Market Trends

Content delivery network (CDN) market leader Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM) has long charged a premium for its services, and rivals such Level 3 (NASDAQ:LVLT) have survived by being much cheaper. However, over the past quarter Akamai has been very aggressive in its prices, matching those of its rivals and sometimes undercutting them. The CDN market is crowded with about 50 vendors, but only four of them have revenues that exceed $50 million. Analysts expect the number of vendors to fall dramatically over the next two years. >>>

SaaS Talent Market Consolidates

The SaaS talent management market is clearly going for market consolidation. Over the past year, there have been numerous acquisitions in the space, the most recent being the $15 million acquisition of Inform by SuccessFactors (NASDAQ:SFSF). Let’s take a closer look. >>>

Acquisition Strategies At EMC And VMware

Global spending on IT is slowly but steadily coming back, an increase that is evident from the results of the various tech companies that we have seen in the past two weeks. Microsoft did come out with a strong set of numbers driven by the Windows 7 uptake. Google, as always, did well. Forrester Research expects IT spending in the United States to rise by 6.6% to $568 billion in 2010, with smart computing and cloud computing expected to lead the way. >>>

Paychex Faces Threat From Intuit; ADP Continues SaaS Roll-up

Payroll giant ADP (NASDAQ:ADP) started off the year with a SaaS acquisition, DO2. This is its second SaaS acquisition within three months, the previous one being HRinterax. Its rival Paychex (NASDAQ:PAYX), on the other hand, has yet to make any acquisition. In fact, Paychex announced the sale of Stromberg to Kronos in October. >>>

Significant Design Wins For QCOM, BRCM

Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) recently provided a disappointing outlook and lowered its 2010 guidance, citing competitive pricing and a slow recovery in developed markets. But the good news is that the company has design wins in Google’s Nexus One, as does Broadcom (NASDAQ:BRCM). Broadcom is also believed to be in the iPad. >>>

Cisco To Continue Gobbling

Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO), the networking giant with annual revenue of $36.1 billion, has made good use of the economic crisis to lap up companies in new and adjacent markets that position it for a battle of the titans as the market recovers. While Cisco is looking to expand to new horizons, its competitors are consolidating and trying to attack its core strengths. >>>

Networking Sector: Alternate Fronts Developing

There have been some major changes in the networking industry recently: Cisco acquired Tandberg for $3.4 billion, Lifesize was lapped up by Logitech for $408 million, and HP acquired 3Com for $2.7 billion. Responding to Cisco’s move, Juniper and Polycom have formed an alliance to offer videoconferencing systems and associated network infrastructure to service providers. >>>

Amazon, Netflix, And Me

With the economy in recession, there were concerns in early November about how strong the holiday season sales would be. But once the numbers from Thanksgiving week were out, industry players started to feel more confident, and National Retail Foundation data confirms that the 2009 holiday season was much better than expected. Specifically, December retail industry sales rose 2.3% (unadjusted) Y-o-Y. Several e-trends are in motion — e-commerce is growing, e-books are gaining adoption, and online movie rentals are are becoming more common. Let’s take a closer look. >>>

Chipmakers And Design Wins

The year that just ended was one of the worst ever for the semiconductor industry, with revenue declining 11.4% to $226 billion. However, last quarter Texas Instruments (NYSE:TXN), STMicroelectronics (NYSE:STM), and Atheros (NASDAQ:ATHR) all reported results that were indicative of a recovering semiconductor market. While for TI and Atheros the outlook was strong, STM was more cautious. >>>