Angie’s List – An Ambiguous Investment

Thus far in 2011, many new age Internet companies have filed their respective S-1s hoping to cash in on the Internet stock valuation hype. For those that have already listed, such as LinkedIn, Groupon, and Pandora, their performance on the stock market has left a lot to be desired. The Bloomberg IPO Index, a measure of the performance of stocks during their first publicly traded year, fell 26% this year, compared with a 5% decline in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index.

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Nokia’s New Strategy Launches

Early this year, Nokia (NYSE:NOK) announced plans to adopt the Microsoft Windows phone operating system as their primary smartphone strategy and move away from their proprietary Symbian operating system. Nokia recently released the Lumia range of phones, their first phones based on the Windows operating system, and are apparently off to a running start in the U.K. market. Nokia has pinned its hopes on this new strategy to strengthen their increasingly tenuous hold on the smartphone market. Let’s take a closer look.

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LivingSocial Defers IPO

According to Yippit data, this September daily deals player LivingSocial grew faster than the market leader, Groupon. Groupon’s market share of the U.S. daily deals market slipped to 54% in September from 57% a month ago. During the same period, LivingSocial’s share climbed from 19% to 22%. Growth is partly attributed to the $10 million LivingSocial’s Whole Foods deal in which LivingSocial sold $20 vouchers at the cost of $10 each.

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Yelp Can No Longer Rely On Past Success

Local recommendation site Yelp finally put rumors to rest as they filed their S-1 last month. Yelp did not divulge many details, but the proposed $100 million IPO is estimated to peg their valuation at $1.0 billion-$2.0 billion. Yelp’s IPO is expected in the market by the first quarter of the next year.

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Expect Several New Products From Intuit In 2012

For tax software companies like Intuit, the previous quarter may have been a slow one. However, the company is using the slack season to work on improving their mobile presence. Intuit’s connected services include an array of service offerings on Software-as-a-Service, mobile, and other digital devices. Today more than 35 million people use these services, which helped generate 62% or $2.4 billion of the company’s revenues last year. Intuit expects to increase that share to 75% of revenues by 2015 and is therefore aggressively launching newer solutions.

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DeVry And Apollo Struggling, With A Few Bright Spots

According to research by Ambient Insight, the global market for online education at schools and businesses is projected to grow from $32.1 billion in 2010 to $50 billion by 2015. Despite rosy projections, tighter government regulations have slowed new student registrations at many for-profit companies. The government restrictions aim to control some of the ways in which for-profit educators have gotten students to sign up for courses. For-profit courses can be very expensive, and some have failed to deliver on their promise of better employment opportunities. Further, student loan default rates are an estimated three times higher for for-profit school loans compared with loans taken by students enrolling in nonprofit schools.

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Interactive Marketers Vie For Customers In An Increasingly Crowded Field

A Forrester Research report on marketing spending in the United States projects that interactive marketing spending in the country will increase to $77 billion in 2016 from an estimated $34 billion in the current year. In 2011, interactive marketing spend accounts for 18% of overall marketing spending in the country. That share is projected to rise to 35% by 2016. Within interactive marketing, spending on campaigns on email, mobile, and social media will grow 27% annually to $15.7 billion by 2016. Another report by IDC estimates that spending on marketing automation will grow to $4.8 billion in 2015 from $3.2 billion reported last year. Spending on analytics is expected to grow to $3.4 billion in 2015 from $2.2 billion reported last year.

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Concur And NetSuite On Larry’s List

Concur (NASDAQ:CNQR) recently reported strong results that beat estimates and said it would be ramping its investment across its business. The prospect of higher spending has led to investors selling shares, causing the share price to fall from about $48 to $43. Let’s take a closer look. >>>

Pandora Turns A Profit And Expands User Base

According to Gartner, end user spending on online music services will increase from $5.9 billion last year to an estimated $6.3 billion in the current year.  The market is expected to be worth $6.8 billion in 2012 and will grow to $7.7 billion in 2015. Over the same period, spending on music in physical formats, including CDs and LPs, is projected to fall to $10 billion in 2015 from $15 billion reported last year. Subscription services are projected to grow from $0.53 billion in 2011 to $2.22 billion by the year 2015, and download-based revenues will grow to $4.05 billion from $3.63 billion estimated this year. Market growth is expected to be driven by emerging markets of Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. In line with these market projections, newly listed online music player Pandora reported a strong performance in the recent quarter.

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Salesforce.com Near 52-Week Low

Oracle recently acquired its first SaaS company, RightNow, for $1.5 billion. RightNow had annual revenue of $185.5 million in 2010, and its acquisition makes Oracle a direct competitor of Salesforce.com. Meanwhile, Salesforce, the leader of the SaaS CRM market, continued to develop its social networking capabilities with its recent acquisitions of social customer service startup Assistly for $50 million and Model Metrics, a mobile and social cloud computing consulting services company for an undisclosed amount. Let’s take a closer look.

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