statistics

Marketers rethinking social media

Marketers have become more realistic about how to best engage their audiences, according to the results of a new IBM survey.

The State of Marketing 2011 report presented today at a marketing event in Boston covered nearly 300 online and direct marketers across a wide range of industries, geographies, and company sizes. Results reveal that marketers have become more practical about their expectations for both mobile and social marketing, as well as the realization that their efforts are strongly tied to IT, especially when it comes to making marketing campaigns actionable for the end-user.

From the survey results:

More than … Read more

VC funding off to strong start in 2011

Private company research firm CB Insights is set to release a new report today on the state of venture capital financing for the first quarter of 2011. The short version: things are looking good, if a bit frothy, with Q1 registering $7.5 billion of venture capital funding invested in 738 deals.

In relation to the last quarter of 2010, there were only three more deals in Q1 of 2011, and both quarters included roughly half of Groupon's $1 billion funding, which doesn't quite explain how Q1 saw roughly $1 billion more in financing for roughly the same … Read more

Twitter: 140 million tweets per day and counting

AUSTIN, Texas--Twitter today published a blog post in advance of its fifth birthday next week--the first tweet (though it wasn't called a tweet back then) was sent by Jack Dorsey, eventually one of Twitter's co-founders, back when it was a small side project at a now-forgotten development company called Obvious. Monday's blog post consisted, more or less, of some of the numbers that prove just how fast it's grown.

Among them: It took three years, two months, and one day for Twitter to hit 1 billion tweets; now, a billion tweets are posted in the course … Read more

Survey: Oracle bad for Java, MySQL (infographic)

On March 3, database vendor EnterpriseDB is set to release the results of its survey conducted at the JavaOne conference last September in San Francisco.

More than 600 IT professionals completed the survey, the results of which provide a bit of insight into community sentiment regarding Oracle's control of open-source projects Java and MySQL.

While opinion polls generally tend to be fairly unscientific--especially when sponsored by rival vendors--the results seem to indicate the IT community is wary of Oracle's plans.

According to the results, 46 percent of respondents believe that open-source projects such as MySQL will stagnate under … Read more

Square aims for growth, drops per transaction fees

A number of blogs pointed us today to news that mobile payment company Square is dropping the $.15 per transaction charge for any business using its mobile payments device and service. Square previously charged 2.75 percent of each transaction amount plus a flat $0.15 per transaction fee.

On the one hand, this is not that big of deal considering that the 2.75 percent is where the bulk of the company's revenue will eventually be made as higher-ticket purchases become more the norm. And, if you consider that 2.75 percent of $5 is $.13, the company … Read more

Google backs tax-transparency challenge

Google has thrown its support behind a contest that searches for ways to map out the U.S. government's esoteric spending patterns. Called "Data Viz Challenge," the contest has been assembled by the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, a digital-arts collective headquartered a stone's throw from Google's Manhattan satellite office, and promises $5,000 to the entrant who can best "visualize how your individual federal income taxes are spent."

Winners will be announced, fittingly, on April 18--the day that tax returns are due. The data is to be sourced from WhatWePayFor.com, a … Read more

In 50 million photos, why all the winter?

ScanCafe, a company that digitizes slides, prints, and negatives, has crossed the threshold of 50 million photos scanned.

That's a lot of photos, though the company likes to point out there are something like 550 billion more, by one estimate, that it views as in danger. "We've got to preserve many more, before they are lost forever," said CEO Sam Allen in a statement.

It's debatable whether digital copies of photos will outlast analog ones, of course. Multiple identical copies of digital images can easily be stored in different locations, protecting against fires, theft, chemical … Read more

Midsize firms easing through economic downturn

A recently released report from IBM (PDF) shows that midsize businesses (100-1,000 employees) are taking advantage of technology better than both their larger and smaller peers to grow during lean economic times.

According to the report, as economies around the world continue their recovery, midsize companies have been the engines driving economic growth--reacting to a "new normal" in terms of spending and growth.

In previous periods of global economic difficulty midsize companies have struggled, often because they have had less capital available to invest in new products and also because big businesses have tended to exploit their … Read more

Venture funding hits two-year high in 2010

Private company research firm CB Insights today released a report that shows venture investment remains strong with $6.5 billion in funding taking place in the fourth quarter of 2010, a gain of roughly 12 percent over the third quarter of 2010.

Overall, 2010 saw $23.7 billion of funding into 2,792 deals representing 14 percent growth in funding and 13 percent growth in deals over 2009.

The report noted a few highlights:

New York outpaced Massachusetts for total number of deals in 2010 and is on a distinctly upward trend for the second half of the year while … Read more