THE BUSINESS OF TECHNOLOGY
Google keeps pretty mum on the subject of YouTube revenue, leaving it to analysts to guess what kind of take the service racks in. Analysts from Morgan Stanley recently took a crack at it. They predict the company will reach $20 billion in gross revenue by 2020 to generate $5 billion in operating income, CNBC reported. The research analysts based … [Read more...]
Yahoo has acquired Tumblr, the popular blogging service, for $1.1 billion cash in one of the largest deals for a social networking company in years, even surpassing Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition for Instagram. Yahoo gets the six year old social blogging platform’s access to a younger audience, as Tumblr is most popular among the 18 to 24 … [Read more...]
Namshi, a product of Rocket Internet’s incubator program, recently raised a $13 million round to harness recent growth in its fashion ecommerce channels in the Middle East. Summit Partners led the investment. Namshi provides ecommerce fashion retail to Middle Eastern markets, featuring clothing, accessories, and footwear for women, men, and kids … [Read more...]
Baidu, the largest search engine in China, has acquired PPStream, the Shanghai-based online video platform, for $370 million, the company confirmed this week following weeks of rumors on the deal. PPS will be merged into iQiyi, Baidu’s video platform, to become China’s largest video platform according to viewing time and number of mobile … [Read more...]
The Pentagon directly accused China of hacking US computer systems to gain access to its military technology. The accusations were part of an 83 page report to Congress on China’s military activity. It is the first time the US military has directly accused the Chinese government of cyber espionage activities into its computer systems. It is the … [Read more...]
Baidu managed to post impressive revenue growth of 40 percent for the first quarter of 2013, but its earnings missed analysts’ expectations due to excessive R&D costs. The company earned $961 million in total revenue, or 5.97 billion RMB, but missed analyst pre-estimates of 5.99 RMB. Its net income increased 8.5 percent to $328.9 million but … [Read more...]
Netflix topped expectations with its first quarter revenue report this year, earning $1 billion in quarterly revenue and surpassing HBO’s user base with 29.2 million subscribers. Though HBO does not publish customer data, the research firm SNL Kagan estimated that the cable channel had 28.7 million subscribers at the end of 2012. As the New York … [Read more...]
Battling Pandora for turf in the on-demand music streaming service business, Spotify announced plans to expand its footprint into Asia, Latin America and Northern Europe recently on its blog. The company will expand into eight new countries, bringing its total markets to 28. The new locations include Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Mexico, … [Read more...]
The China Internet Network Information Center released some startling figures on the growth, size and potential of China’s ecommerce market. The sector earned more than 1.2 trillion RMB ($190 billion) in 2012. That’s a 66.5 increase over what it made the year before. And with 242 million Chinese Internet users purchasing goods last year in a … [Read more...]
Facebook knows all about you, more than you probably know about yourself. A new study reveals that Facebook “Like” button data can reveal a surprising amount of information. Studying more than 58,000 volunteers who participated in the “myPersonality” app on Facebook, the research shows that the magical “Like” thumb can be used with over … [Read more...]