If it’s in your town, it’s not called “welfare”
Facebook may create 200 jobs in Austin over the next four years, thanks to a $1.4 million incentive from the state of Texas. The move would be the first major U.S. expansion outside of Palo Alto, Calif., where the company is headquartered, according to officials. The city has also offered the company a $200,000 incentive. Facebook is investing about $3.1 million to set up operations in Texas, according to Gov. Rick Perry’s office.
More air travel in Austin
Passenger traffic at Austin-Bergstrom International Aiport was up 6 percent in January from a year earlier, the biggest gain in more than a year.
Covering profitable companies is clearly unprofitable
Gartner predicted $3.3 trillion in IT spending in 2010. But when we looked at coverage in the business press, enterprise IT themes (enterprise software, storage, networking equipment, etc.) barely register. Sure, there are awesome enterprise reporters at business publications (Steve Lohr, Ashlee Vance, and John Waters, to name a few). But in the overall editorial agenda, enterprise IT is treated like consumer tech’s snaggletoothed twin – it barely even makes the family photo. How underrepresented is enterprise IT in the business press? Oracle ($22 billion in revenue, $5 billion in profits) only cracked the top 10 companies by coverage for 1 of the 8 we looked at: Fortune. Cisco ($40 billion in revenue, $8 billion in profits) didn’t make it on anyone’s top 10 list. IBM ($100 billion in revenue, $12 billion in profits) wasn’t even in The New York Times’ top 20, and was #19 for The Wall Street Journal.
Tempest in a 5% teapot
I pointed Leigh at this post by Jeremy Allaire, founder and CEO of BrightCove, which gets into detail on the emerging battle between Flash and HTML5. As the post states, ‘there’s a lot of nuance here’ – and it’s by no means a foregone conclusion that Flash will be going away anytime soon. Also interestingly (and probably not coincidentally), $TIVO announced wide-ranging support for Flash this week. In addition, Flash currently represents only about 5% of Adobe’s revenue and is dwarfed by the revenues derived from its desktop applications business.
Software in 3D by lines of code
Air Force F-22 Raptor: 1.7 million
F-35 Joint Strike Fighter: 5.7 million
Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner: 6.5 million
Typical Mercedes/BMW/etc: ~100 million
Apple is a Mobile Device Company
Cook also pointed out that the majority of Apple’s revenues now comes from mobile devices (including laptops) or content for those devices. Indeed, if you look at the breakdown of Apple’s fourth quarter revenues of $15.7 billion, nearly $12 billion of that came from portable Macbooks ($2.8 billion), iPods ($3.4 billion) and iPhones $5.6 billion). And another $1.2 billion came from iTunes.
Windows 7 Mo’
It was just over a month ago that Microsoft officials said the company had sold 60 million copies of Windows 7. On March 2, they updated that tally, claiming 90 million copies of Windows 7 have been sold to date.
I remember Brightkite!
Notably, Brightkite has over 2 million active users currently around the world. While that might seem small compared to the bigger social networks like Facebook and Twitter, that’s actually four times the size of the newer rival Foursquare, that is getting much of the hype these days. Another interesting tidbit: Brightkite has had localized promotions in place for some time now, and they’re seeing strong usage.
SaaS Accounting
Taking unique visitor and total visits as your benchmark, it should be no surprise that QuickBooksOnline and FreshBooks are miles out in front of the remainder. FreshBooks recorded 830,000 uniques (inc cookies) generating 2.2 million visits. At the bottom of the scale, FinancialForce managed what seems a meagre 11,000 uniques but then it is very much in early stage growth. One surprise for me was WinWeb which only weighed in with a total of 48K uniques.
Big numbers, but no party hats
More than 2.23 million boxes went out the door, up 4.5 per cent from the final quarter of 2008. But don’t throw a party yet, as overall server revenues fell by 3.2 per cent to $12.6bn.
Disclosure: IT Database is a client, as are IBM, Microsoft, and Adobe. See the RedMonk client list for others and related.
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