Payroll Providers Using Acquisitions To Grow In Still-Shaky Market

Analysts estimate that the third-party payroll services industry accounts for $45 billion annually in the U.S. Industry observers project growth in the sector in the following year as the economic conditions improve. Meanwhile, payroll service providers in the country are already seeing strong results.

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U.S. Solar Industry Reorganizes In The Face Of Challenges

Reduced feed-in-tariffs from European markets, lower prices, and increased competition from Chinese manufacturers continued to hurt the solar power sector. Three U.S. solar players have already announced bankruptcy this year and the recent quarterly results of the country’s two major solar powers, SunPower and First Solar, don’t look promising.

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LinkedIn’s Mounting Challenges With Large Address Books

Researcher eMarketer projects ad revenues from social networks to grow to $5.54 billion this year and double by 2013. Although half of the current year spending is in the U.S., researchers expect that trend to shift to a point that the non-U.S. market will account for 52% of the market. They expect the professional social network LinkedIn to account for $249.6 million in ad revenues worldwide by 2013, compared with $140.8 million expected this year. Although growth at the site will continue, it will do so at a much slower pace.

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ARM Gaining Momentum

HP last month announced that it would be selling low-power servers based on ARM technology. Earlier, Microsoft announced that future generations of Windows operating system would support ARM-based chips, and Google announced that its Chrome operating system will run on ARM technology. These developments indicate how popular ARM’s low-power technology is becoming, even in the traditional computing industry where Intel dominates. Let’s take a look at their recent performances.

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Overvalued At 80 Billion, Facebook Expects 4.27 Billion In Revenue For 2011

According to a comScore report released for the third quarter of the year, Facebook accounted for 15% of total online display advertising spend, compared with Google’s and Yahoo’s 10% share each. Within the U.S., Facebook owns 28% market share of all display ads, compared with 23% a year ago. Surprisingly, though, Facebook is ranked fourth in unique U.S. visitors. Google has the most unique visitors in the U.S., followed by Yahoo and Microsoft. However, users spend more time on Facebook than they do on any of these other web portals.

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Athenahealth Takes Leading Role In Healthcare Administration Changes

A Frost and Sullivan report, U.S. Hospital EHR Market, 2009–2016: Charting the Course for Dramatic Change, published earlier last month, reveals that the electronic health records (EHR) market is on path to grow more than six times its 2009 revenues of under a billion dollars to $6.5 billion in 2012, a clear indication that the implementation of the HITECH Act resulted in increased spending by health care providers on IT infrastructure. The researcher believes that significant change has happened since 2009, when approximately 12% of hospitals were using basic or advanced EHR, and only 2% of those were using EHRs in a way that would qualify for meaningful use. HITECH Act laid out several parameters to identify providers using their inter-operable EHR system for meaningful use of delivery of healthcare services, and offered incentives to these providers with additional payments received through Medicare and Medicaid. To help healthcare providers to benefit from these financial incentives, EHR providers are expanding their offerings.

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Expensive Mistakes And Rising Costs Plague Netflix

In the past quarter, Netflix has managed to not only disappoint its investors but also its customers. Contrary to other online players such as Hulu, which has added customers at a rapid pace during the quarter, Netflix’s loss of subscribers is a shock. The stock price has fallen 75% since the all-time high it attained this summer.

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New Kindle Heats Up E-Reader Market

According to a Goldman Sachs report published earlier this year, Kindle accounts for 67% market share [of e-readers] in the U.S., followed by Nook with a 22% share. Amazon also leads in digital book sales with 58% market share, followed by Barnes & Noble’s at 27% and Apple at 9%. The way Amazon is rolling out its new Kindle line-up, it looks as though their market share is going to grow much higher in the coming years.
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Comcast, Viacom Shifting With The Times

The cable TV industry continues to face stiff competition. With players like Hulu eating into other player’s share of content and subscriber base, the war on cable remains heated. Furthermore, Microsoft recently announced the plans to offer TV content on Xbox 360 for Xbox 360 Live users, making it possible for people to watch programming even without a set-top box. Despite such market circumstances, players continued to surpass market expectations.

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XBox Pushes Microsoft Deeply Into Home Entertainment

Gartner’s third quarter study on PC shipments reported that global PC shipments grew 3.2% over the year to 91.8 million units, compared with the earlier projected estimates of 5.1% growth for the quarter. The continuing weakness in the U.S. and EMEA markets are contributing to this slow growth. U.S. PC shipments grew a mere 1.1% over the year to 17.8 million units. Gartner believes that the increasing popularity of Media tablets and smartphones is pushing sales away from the PC segment. Within the U.S., Apple reported the strongest growth among the top five vendors with shipments growing 21.5% over the year driven by strong growth in sales of MacBook Air. EMEA PC shipments of 26.6 million units reported a 2.9% decline over the year. Emerging markets helped drive worldwide growth. Asia-Pacific markets grew 6% to 31.8 million units and Latin America grew 19.6%.

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