Eventbrite in the IPO Pipeline

Social networking giant Facebook has helped define successful business models for several other online players. The ticketing company Eventrbrite is one such example. Eventbrite is expected to file for its IPO by the end of this year.  A couple of years ago, I spoke with  co-founder Julia Hartz on the entrepreneurial story of the company. Here is a review of how the company has fared since then.

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Workday: IPO or Acquisition by Salesforce?

According to a Gartner report, global spending on the Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) market is projected to grow 17.9% this year to $14.5 billion. The market is projected to be worth $22.1 billion by the year 2015. The North American SaaS market is projected to grow from $7.8 billion last year to $9.1 billion this year, while Western Europe will grow from $2.7 billion to $3.2 billion. Within the segment, analysts believe that human capital management (HCM) is becoming an increasingly effective way for on-premise vendors to make further inroads with their clients. HCM players chiefly offer services for recruitment and learning and development and are close to human resources functions like payroll that are already handled by on-premises enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
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Trion World Goes From Zero to $100M in Nine Months

According to the recently released Global Online Gaming Report 2012 by researcher yStats.com, global online gaming revenue is projected to grow by more than 10% annually from 2010 through 2016. A report by DFC Intelligence pegs the online gaming market to be worth $18 billion worldwide. Online gaming publisher Trion Worlds Inc. is counting on this trend as they gear up for an IPO.

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Accenture: A Major Job Creation Force

According to Everest Group’s Market Vista: Q1 2012, during the first quarter, the global outsourcing and offshoring market transaction volumes remained relatively flat with 441 outsourcing deals compared with 433 transactions signed a quarter ago. First quarter global transaction volumes increased 11% sequentially to an all-commodity volume of $3 billion, with growth being driven from business process outsourcing transactions, which reported an increase of 9% over the quarter. Analysts believe that the global outsourcing services market will remain steady in terms of transaction volumes until economic conditions stabilize.

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Hulu Shies Away from Public Market

Online video service Hulu has put aside all IPO plans. It is instead concentrating on growing its presence in the market. As of May 2012, Hulu reported close to 38 million viewers, of which more than two million were subscribers of the paid service, Hulu Plus.  Also in May, Hulu reported 25.6 million viewers averaging more than four hours of viewership every day. The company has not disclosed its financials, but at the most recent reported results, Hulu saw revenues grow more than 60% over the year to $420 million for the past fiscal year.

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ON24: Yet Another SaaS Company Eying IPO

According to a research conducted on virtual events, analysts have found that during the past year, more than 60% of marketers increased spending on such events. The survey revealed that the majority of businesses have never hosted a virtual event, and only 28% of those surveyed were comfortable with hosting one. The overall size of the virtual events market has not been clearly established. According to a recent study by the Virtual Edge Institute, from 2010-2015, marketers will have spent nearly $18.6 billion on virtual events.

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Brainshark: IPO or Acquisition Target?

As part of my sales 2.0 case studies, I introduced Brainshark, a provider of an SaaS platform that helps organizations create, narrate, share, and track online multimedia presentations. Analysts expect that Brainshark may now be deciding whether to start an IPO process. Let’s take a look at how the business has fared so far.

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Couchsurfing: Could It Be the EHarmony of Friendship?

We have been covering AirBnb for a while, and the trend of travelers crashing on the couches of locals is surely an interesting one. Recently, Benchmark Capital funded a non-profit company in this area, which intrigued us greatly.

The idea for social travel network Couchsurfing.com came in 1999 when Casey Fenton made a network of friends in Reykjavik. Fenton was looking for an inexpensive couch to crash on in Iceland, and he e-mailed more than 1,500 students in Reykjavik searching for one. Not only did he end up finding a couch to crash on, he also got to experience Iceland in a new way and figured out a new non-profit business idea.

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Oracle Succeeds in Software, Struggles in Hardware

Last week Gartner lowered growth projections for the enterprise software market because of worsening macroeconomic conditions. Worldwide spending on enterprise application software is projected to grow 4.5% over the year to $120.4 billion this year, compared with earlier estimates of 5% growth. The researcher expects enterprise resource planning (ERP) sales to remain the largest enterprise application software segment, with revenues of $24.9 billion this year. Sales of office suites will come in at $16.5 billion. Business intelligence revenues are projected to be worth $13 billion, and CRM revenues are expected to be more than $13 billion this year.

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HubSpot Aims for 2013 IPO

According to a study published by inbound marketer HubSpot, The State of Inbound Marketing Report, organizations that use inbound marketing channels as the preferred mode of marketing find costs per lead to be 62% lower those that prefer outbound marketing tools. Inbound marketing is also benefiting from increased adoption. The report shows that in 2011, the share of inbound marketing channels for lead generation increased to 17%, from 9% in 2009. Social media sources such as Facebook, Twitter, and even blogs are helping to push up inbound marketing efforts. Businesses were willing to spend nearly 29% of their lead generation budgets on social media platforms in 2011, compared with a 24% allocation in 2009. Today, more than 65% of businesses have blogs on their websites, compared with 48% in 2009. The impact of blogs can be seen in the fact that 57% of  businesses using blogs acquired customers through these blogs.

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