LinkedIn Executing Steadily

According to a recent report, Talent Acquisition Factbook 2011: Benchmarks and Trends of Spending, Staffing and Key Talent Metrics, worldwide spending on recruiting software, services, staff, content, and consulting is estimated to be over $130 billion.  The improving U.S. job market will also help spur growth in recruiting. Recently listed LinkedIn is working hard to be the leader in this market.

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Groupon After IPO

According to Daily Deal Media, the daily deals market has become volatile. The report reveals that worldwide, nearly 800 daily deal sites shut down in the second half of 2011. The total included 1,348 sites in Asia alone. But there was growth in the European and Latin American markets, where there were 235 and 324 new deals sites, respectively. Analysts believe that the shutting down of sites is more an indicator of bigger players like Groupon taking out competition and not of a shrinking market opportunity.

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Nokia Pins Hopes On Lumia

In April 2011, Nokia (NYSE:NOK) entered into an agreement with Microsoft to adopt the Microsoft Windows Phone platform. They released their Lumia range of phones, their first phones based on the Windows operating system, in November 2011. In their recent financial results they reported sales of more than one million Lumia phones, exceeding analyst estimates. Let’s take a closer look.

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ADP, Paychex Benefiting From Job Growth

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, total nonfarm payroll employment in the country grew by 243,000 jobs last month as the unemployment rate fell to 8.3%. Job growth was widespread across the private sector, specifically in leisure and hospitality, and manufacturing. The numbers spell good news for payroll processing firms, which managed to beat market expectations in the recent quarter results and are expected to perform better in the coming quarters.

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Hulu Growing Fast, Needs More Content

According to a study by media agency, OMD, 80% of the online population in the U.S. streams video regularly. The study conducted on 1,600 respondents who streamed videos regularly showed that 24% of those studied had cancelled their cable subscriptions. While the study did not specify reasons for cancellation, analysts believe that cable’s services were replaced by online video streaming services such as those of Hulu and Netflix. Another study by Nielsen also showed that over the past three years, the number of unique visitors to online video services has grown 26% and the time spent by them on online streaming has doubled. Online video streaming provider Hulu has also seen strong growth.

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Amazon And India’s $200 Billion E-Commerce Market

According to a recently released Forrester report, U.S. Online Retail Forecast, 2010 to 2015, online retail sales in the U.S. grew 13% in 2010 to $176.2 billion. Online retail sales are expected to grow at a rate of 10% annually over 2010–2015 to reach $278.9 billion. Within the U.S., e-commerce accounts for 8% of total retail sales. Excluding grocery sales, e-commerce accounts for 11% of total retail sales in the country, and that number is expected to grow to 15% by the year 2015. Online retailer Amazon.com is obviously benefiting from this growth.

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SAP Needs To Acquire SaaS Portfolio

SAP, one of the largest companies in the enterprise resource planning (ERP) market, recently reported strong results – its eighth straight quarter of double-digit growth – while its rival Oracle recently reported disappointing results. In December SAP announced plans to acquire SaaS talent management vendor SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion. After Oracle’s $1.5 billion acquisition of SaaS vendor RightNow, SAP seems to be getting serious about its cloud strategy. Let’s take a closer look.

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Facebook’s Monetization Potential

Finally, the most-awaited tech IPO is round the corner. Social media giant Facebook  filed their S-1 this week, thus ending the long wait. Facebook plans to raise $10 billion through this IPO. According to Dealogic, an IPO of this scale will make the IPO the biggest ever in tech, surpassing Google’s $1.9 billion IPO debut in 2004.

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ExactTarget Rides Email Marketing Wave

According to a Forrester report, U.S. Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2011 to 2016, total advertising spend in the U.S. is expected to grow to $77 billion. In 2011, spending on interactive channels, which includes display advertising, search, email, mobile, and social media advertising, accounted for 16% of advertising spending. These channels’ contribution is expected to grow to 26% by 2016. Online marketing services provider ExactTarget is working to capitalize on this growth as it gets ready for an IPO.

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Netflix’s Quarter From Hell

According to the latest comScore report on online video viewing for December 2011, 182 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content. On average, 23.2 hours of content were watched per viewer. A total of 43.5 billion videos were viewed online by U.S. Internet users. The figures translate to an impressive 85% of the U.S. Internet audience viewing online video content. Google sites were ranked as the leading online video content destination with more than 157 million unique visitors in December accessing 21.8 billion videos. Despite its immense popularity, Netflix did not even figure in the top 10 destinations in that month.

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