growth

Is that '25 Things' meme driving Facebook growth?

Unless you have been inhabiting the underground bunker formerly occupied by Dick Cheney, you've probably seen loads of press coverage over a "25 Things About Me" Internet meme that was spreading on Facebook. Basically, members would create a Facebook "note" containing 25 facts about themselves, and then "tag" 25 friends encouraging them to do the same.

Yes, it was a bona fide phenomenon, but I avoided writing about it, because I thought the whole thing was...dumb. Internet memes of that nature have been around since goodness knows when. Breathless press hype over … Read more

Facebook's growth goes faster and faster and faster

Facebook is still growing like wildfire: earlier this week, the social network put out stats that peg its active-user count at 140 million.

Inside Facebook blogger Justin Smith compared this to the date that Facebook said it hit 130 million members, and estimated that Facebook must be growing by a whopping 600,000 or 700,000 users per day.

We've checked in with Facebook to see if it has an official comment on that estimation; earlier this year, the company's network was growing by 250,000 users per day.

Statistics firms like Nielsen, ComScore, and Compete.com all … Read more

Premium LCD TV brands slash prices to compete for holiday shoppers

Black Friday retail results were a pleasant surprise for retailers this year, with sales inching up slightly from the same day last year. A big part of that was the heavy discounting designed to attract consumers.

TV makers were no exception. But the discounts on LCD TVs were heaviest from the premium names in the business--Sony, Samsung, Sharp, Philips, LG, and Toshiba.

That's according to market research firm iSuppli, which reported Thursday that the top brands cut slashed prices on their LCD TV models on average of 23 percent for the holiday shopping weekend beginning on the day after … Read more

Analysts: Mobile to weather world financial storm

The mobile-phone industry is expected to boom, despite the current global financial crisis, thanks to new growth in emerging markets, according to Portio Research.

In a Monday report, the analyst firm predicted that the world's population of mobile-phone users will increase from the current 50 percent to 80 percent in 2013. This translates to a "staggering 5.8 billion people," Portio said.

"The mobile industry continues to confound expectations with spectacular accelerating growth," the report stated, attributing the growth mainly to China and India's markets.

China topped Portio's list of top growth markets, … Read more

Finding gems in troubled tech funds

Technology investment funds are taking a beating, ranking nearly dead last among more than a dozen categories of domestic stock funds tracked by mutual research company Morningstar.

But even though all of the 75 specialty technology funds listed by Morningstar are down year-to-date, some of the portfolio managers have found ways to minimize the carnage, which has seen the category pushed into the red by an average of 19.16 percent as of Friday.

Within tech funds, an index approach has proved to be a more successful strategy in this current climate, as evidenced by the North Track NYSE Arca Tech 100 Index Funds.. … Read more

ComScore: Facebook is beating MySpace worldwide

New numbers from metrics firm ComScore show that in May, the battle of the social-networking sites may have gained a new front-runner: Facebook appears to have surpassed longtime rival MySpace in worldwide unique visitors for the first time. ComScore representatives said that this began in April when Facebook passed MySpace by a hair, and widened in May.

Facebook, according to ComScore, pulled in 123.9 million unique visitors in the month of May, beating MySpace's 114.6, and 50.6 billion page views compared to MySpace's 45.4 billion. It's been a slow but steady upward climb … Read more

Kleiner Perkins launches $500 million Green Growth Fund

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers on Thursday announced the expected creation of a fund dedicated to growing green-technology firms.

The Silicon Valley venture capital firm said $500 million out of a larger $1.2 billion fund will go to "growth stage" green-technology firms that need additional capital to commercialize their work.

Kleiner Perkins established a $100 million green-technology fund in 2006 for start-up seed funding. This Green Growth Fund will make investments of $10 million to $50 million to ramp up existing companies, Kleiner Perkins executives told The Wall Street Journal.

The structure of the fund reflects one … Read more

SaaS is driving the world's 60 fastest-growing software companies, study finds

CIOZone.com has ranked the top-60 fastest-growing (public) software companies of at least $150 million in revenue, with VMware leading the pack and Red Hat claiming 12th place with a 33.6 percent growth rate. Not bad for a company that gives away its software for free.

But then, perhaps it's not surprising since Google, ranked second on the list, largely does the same.

What's most impressive in the list, however, is the growth rate being sustained by Oracle and Microsoft, because they're growing from a much larger base. It's fantastic that Red Hat is growing … Read more

Nokia: European handset-sales growth took a hit in '07

In filings with U.S. regulators, Nokia on Thursday estimated that the growth rate for sales of its handsets in Europe had shrunk to 3 percent in 2007 from 16 percent in 2006.

What's more, the company said its growth rates had cooled in the Middle East and Africa (to 19 percent from 68 percent in 2006), North America (to 6 percent from 13 percent), and Latin America (to 10 percent from 15 percent), Reuters notes.

The global picture wasn't quite as wearying for Nokia: 2007 sales in the Asia-Pacific region grew by 34 percent, and in China, … Read more