Pandora’s Scaling Issues

According to the Recording Industry Association of America, the money spent per capita on recorded music for the U.S. fell from $71 in 1999 to $26 in 2009. Digital music services such as single song and album downloads, subscriptions, online radio stations, and mobile phone downloads fundamentally changed the way the industry worked, beginning around 2003. By 2009, Internet and satellite radio was earning close to $0.2 billion in revenues and single song downloads were accounting for over $1.2 billion in revenues. >>>

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In A Wise Move, ADP Enters Healthcare IT

Unemployment rates in the country inched up marginally from 8.8% in March to 9.0% in April. Despite this only slight increase, the unemployment rate was 0.8% higher than in November. ADP’s report on non-farm payroll recorded the creation of 179,000 jobs in the private sector in April, which is significantly lower than February’s job gains of 217,000 and March’s gains of 207,000. Over the first four months of 2011, an average 196,000 private sector jobs have been created in the United States.

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Angie’s List Trying To Scale

Over the past decade, the growing importance of niche communities in today’s business dynamics has become increasingly clear. Local search and classifieds have helped address the needs of these communities. While Yelp remains a leader in leveraging user-generated content, Angie’s List has also established itself as a strong contender, albeit with a slightly different focus. Angies’s List was founded in 1995 in Ohio by Angie Hicks and William Oesterle as a website to list actual customer reviews of various local service providers. Service professionals including doctors, plumbers, contractors, and others in more than 500 categories are rated by customers in a report card–style review. Based on the reviews, the service publishes an overall grade for the service provider to help future customers make decisions about which service to use.

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Flipboard’s Valuation Without Monetization Strategy

Over the past few months, we have looked at many new Web-based companies that have managed to deliver sky-high valuations without supporting revenues.  Flipboard is one more such company: It has a service that users like, but it has yet to figure out a successful monetization strategy.

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EBay Expanding Its International Footprint

According to a Forrester market report for 2010, worldwide online retail sales last year were worth $439 billion and accounted for 5% of all retail sales. Online retail sales are expected to grow to $536 billion by 2012 and will account for 12% of overall sales. The report estimates the U.S. market to grow to $279 billion in 2015 from $179 billion in 2010 and the Western European market to grow 11% to $156 billion in 2014 from $93 billion in 2009. Within Asia-Pacific, Japan’s market was estimated to be worth $45 billion in online retail sales in 2010, and China was estimated to reach $49bn in 2010 with a growth rate double of that of Europe. It is little surprise that online retailer, eBay, is focusing on international expansion.

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Netflix In A Formidable Position

NPD Group’s latest VideoWatch Digital tracking report found that Netflix commanded a 61% market share of the movie/TV streaming and downloads market in the U.S.. Comcast ran a distant second with 8%, followed by DirecTV, Time Warner Cable and Apple each claiming a 4% share. According to the report, digital video now accounts for nearly 25% of all video volume at home. In the recently reported quarterly results, with 22.8 million U.S. subscribers, online streaming and DVD rental provider, Netflix, has become bigger than Comcast, the country’s largest cable TV provider.

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SAP Banks On In-Memory Computing

The strong results from technology bellwethers Oracle and IBM set the tone for high expectations. Despite double-digit revenue growth and profit growth, SAP (NYSE:SAP) missed analyst estimates. However, it says it is undeterred from achieving its goal of $20 billion annual revenue by 2015. Let’s take a closer look.

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Indexing Sites: A Retrospective

Search engines such as those owned by Google do a good job at finding the right mathematical fit for a user’s query. But traditional search engines don’t necessarily give results that are best suited to the user’s interests. Social bookmarking and indexing sites such as StumbleUpon, Delicious and Digg, to name a few, index the Internet’s ever-increasing amount of information for content specific to a user’s choice and help users store, share and access links that may not have turned up on the traditional search. Here is a snapshot of the big players in this space.

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Microsoft Fighting Back On All Fronts

An IDC report released earlier last month saw global PC shipments fall 3.2% over the year in the first quarter of this year. IDC had projected 1.5% growth in shipments for the quarter and attributes the decline to rising fuel and commodity prices and the tsunami in Japan. In the U.S., shipments fell 10% over the previous year. Japan saw a 15.9% decline during the quarter. There was some growth in the Asia Pacific market, excluding Japan, where shipments increased 5.6% over the year.

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Amazon Firing On All Cylinders; Crash A Blip

According to an eMarketer report, e-commerce sales in the U.S. will continue to grow over the next four years to $269.8 billion in 2015 from $165.4 billion recorded last year. The Commerce Department estimates that e-commerce sales in 2010 in the country increased 14.8% over the previous year’s $144.1 billion. eMarketer projects sales to grow 13.7% this year with growth dropping to 11.3% in 2012, 9.7% in 2013 and 8.7% in 2014 and 8.1% in 2015.

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