The accompanying chart from TechFlash says it all: Online sales just aren't growing anymore. October's 1 percent growth over October 2007 is the worst performance measured by ComScore since they began tracking stats in 2001. TechFlash quotes Gian Fulgoni, chairman of the research firm: "We can only hope that the…
The financiapocalypse? So 2008. The economy may start growing again in the second half of next year. July? That's practically next month. Too bad about your job, though: Unemployment is expected to peak at 7.7 percent in December 2009. [WSJ]
A press release from Spencer Stuart, the executive recruiting firm, celebrates a "milestone": More than half of the Silicon Valley companies it tracks now have at least one woman on their boards of directors. This is not the accomplishment they would have you think: Among the boards of companies on the S&P 500, 89…
At a Salesforce.com event, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg announced that the social network has hit 120 million users — up from 100 million in late August. The company is succeeding in its stated plan to emphasize growth over revenues. A pity that, with the lack of a strong advertising business to support the growth,…
“Anyone who isn’t prepared for ads to go down 40 percent is crazy.” That's what Valleywag publisher Nick Denton blabbed to the wantrepreneurs at an event in New York last week. AllThingsD reblogger Peter Kafka rolled up Denton's irrational gloom into a big-picture gloom post this morning. There's some good news buried…
The Jesusphone is no longer just for privileged white folks. "The strongest growth in users is coming from those earning less than the median household income, particularly since the launch of the iPhone 3G." So says a report from ComScore, which concludes that "lower-income mobile subscribers are increasingly turning…
Online shopping is now mainstream enough to be a solid barometer of consumer sentiment. So this news from Hitwise, the website-measurement research house, is disturbing: Traffic to e-commerce sites has been dropping for eight straight weeks.
Medialets, a company which tracks which iPhone apps users of Apple's smartphone download from the company's iTunes store, reports that Google's Android Market, a similar service, buy mostly the same kind of apps for their Googlephones. Games, shopping, music, and weather predominate. Google launched Android Market…
Wall Street Journal writer Ben Worthen's summary of a new survey of IT employees: "Forty-eight percent were confident in their ability to find a new job, even though they don't believe anyone is hiring." Of course, Ben: Tech workers are Ron Paul-voting, Ayn Rand-reading rugged-individualist übermenschen who believe…
The Linux Foundation has strategically leaked a report showing that the "Linux ecosystem" — distributors, resellers, support specialists, and other hangers-on of the free-to-download operating system — is now worth $25 billion. Ignore the inevitable quibbling over methodology; what this means is that every open-source…
If you weren't live-tweeting the debate last night, you have missed out on all the hoopla concerning Joe the Plumber — the Ohio Mr. Clean doppelganger that asked Obama about his tax plans for small businesses — now being used as the archetype for American blue collar. But it's another Joe, one from Texas, who owns…
"My mom and Julia spent most of the time comparing their respective startups," Tumblr jockey Nick Noyes blogs about his dinner with New York's notorious nobody, Julia Allison. "Interesting statistic of the night: her site garners 500,000 visits per month." Does Nick mean Julia, or his mom?Because Quantcast places both …
One goal of the Facebook redesign was to kill pointless widgets that cluttered user-profiles. It's working. When Facebook launched its platform last year, AllFacebook's Nick O'Neil created your typical one-trick app: the Bush Countdown Clock. All it did was sit on a user's profile like a badge, and yet it attracted…
In a survey, workers revealed that they spend a fourth of their time online on personal matters. Of the emails they sent at work, 80 percent were personal. Popular sites for goofing off are online trading sites, chatting services, and file-sharing sites. Scandalous! They should be reading blogs instead. [New Zealand…
During the first six months of 2007, display advertising spending online grew 17.7 percent over the prior year. During the first six months of this year, that spending grew only 8 percent. The slowed growth is due to marketers simply spending less money online and off as overall advertising declined 1.6 percent over…
While Google's new browser Chrome got lots of attention, it hasn't amassed many users. Net Applications tracks browser share across 40,000 sites, and Chrome has at best won around one percent of market share, with usage slipping from 0.85 percent to only 0.77 percent since last week. But hey, it's probably still…
Ray Soifer, a top-rated banking analyst based in Arizona, has an explanation for the crisis gripping the stock market: Blame Harvard! Soifer has long studied the proportion of Harvard MBAs who pursue careers in finance; when more than 3 in 10 head for Wall Street, it's time for investors to sell, he says. The…
Scorelogix, a research firm which has created an index of job security, says — no surprise! — that the chances of keeping your job dropped again in August. This was before this week's six-figure layoffs, mind you. The good news? There are some industries where job security is rising.
Thumb-typing while driving cripples your control of the steering wheel by 91 percent, and your reaction time by 35 percent, reports England's Transport Research Laboratory. That's far worse than booze or pot, which degrade response times by 12 and 21 percent, respectively. Still, the best reason to pull over is…
The latest report from the Pew Internet survey machine says, "69 percent of online Americans use webmail services, store data online, or use software programs such as word processing applications whose functionality is located on the Web." What they really mean is: A lot of people use Hotmail. But while the 69…
