Quora, Yet Another Valuation Without Revenue Startup?

Quora calls itself a startup building a continually improving collection of questions and answers. It was founded by former Facebook employees Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever in 2009. Initially launched as a private, by-invitation-only initiative early last year, the question-and-answer site was opened to all in the summer of 2010. >>>

China Struggling With Fraud and Copyright Amidst Massive Internet Growth

Access to the Internet in China is continuing to expand rapidly. According to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), last year the number of China’s total Internet users increased 19% to reach 457 million. Not surprisingly, growth in the number of Internet users is driving online sales. In a report published by China e-Business Research Center, Internet sales in China, which includes business-to-business, business-to-consumer and consumer-to-consumer transactions, increased to 4.5 trillion yuan (~US$684 billion) in 2010. Overall, consumer online spending doubled to 513.1 billion yuan (~US$78.3 billion) in 2010 from a year earlier and accounted for nearly 3% of total retail sales in the country. The report predicts online retail sales to grow to over 1 trillion yuan (~US$153 billion) in the next two years.

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Looking Inside The Foursquare Hype

Geolocation services are becoming one of the next hot things in the social marketing space. While players such as foursquare and Gowalla are dedicated providers of geolocation-based marketing services, bigger players, including Google and Facebook have, have entered the space with their own offerings  – Google Places and Facebook Places.

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Hulu Gains From Online Video Momentum

Today, viewers can watch online video content free on sites such as Google’s YouTube or by accessing a subscription-based service such as Netflix or Hulu Plus. While analysts believe that the availability of content in this way has led to cord-cutting and trouble for traditional cable companies, the recent financial performance of leading cable players like Comcast has indicated otherwise. Still, market reports by Convergence Consulting Group estimate that 1.6 million U.S. households will have replaced their cable connections with alternate video content models by the end of the current year. Researcher SNL Kagan estimates that by 2014, 46.3 million homes will have at least one TV with a broadband connection to the Internet and 7% of the country’s population, an estimated 8.1 million homes, will switch to online video content instead of cable.

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Bootstrapped CrowdStar Chasing Funding-Flushed Zynga and Rovio

The U.S. social gaming market is expected to grow at 28% in the current year to $1.1 billion and another 21% in 2012 to reach $1.32 billion. Zynga leads the segment with more than 360 million users accessing its gaming properties. But smaller players such as CrowdStar are giving it worthwhile competition.

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Rovio, Finland’s Answer To Zynga

Gartner projects worldwide mobile gaming market to reach $11.4 billion by 2014. The mobile gaming market is estimated to have grown 19% over the year in 2010 to cross $5.6 billion in revenues. Gartner’s report estimates that 70% to 80% of all mobile app downloads are mobile games. Further, 60% to 70% of those downloaded games are free. Most mobile games are priced in the range of free to $5. The low price of these games is causing concern among veteran video game players. Recently, Nintendo’s management voiced concerns that mobile games are impacting the quality of games and influencing the consumer’s expectations of prices for games.

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Epocrates: A Mobile App Case Study In Healthcare

Epocrates (NASDAQ:EPOC) was founded in 1998 by two Stanford students as a means to ease doctors’ burden of carrying around books to look up drug information, drug interactions, and dosing information. Since then, the company has transformed itself into a leading provider of clinical information and solutions to healthcare providers. It boasts of a network of over 1 million healthcare professionals, spanning over 300,000, or 45%, of U.S. physicians. Ranked tenth in the top 50 list of most innovative companies for 2011 by Fast Company, Epocrates also launched its well-received IPO in February of this year.

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EDA Feeling Icahn’s Touch

The EDA industry is finally seeing some much-needed action. Carl Icahn, the largest shareholder in Mentor Graphics (NASDAQ:MENT), realizes the importance of consolidation in the industry and believes that Mentor needs to be merged with another player, a move that could cut costs significantly. Several years ago, I had proposed the same thing.

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