market

The traditional PC market is in dire need of some hot new products to drive growth. Too bad that's probably not going to happen soon, according to market researcher IDC.

The worldwide PC market has basically slowed to a crawl this year, IDC says in a report released today. It expects just 0.9 percent growth this year, the second consecutive year of growth below two percent.

While citing the usual macroeconomic culprits -- slowness in Asia and mature markets -- the report said consumers are "considering spending on other products like media tablets and smartphones" while … Read more

Google's ingenious marketing and creative departments -- the folks who tirelessly reinvent the company's logo in the form of "doodles" (and by so doing seem to have taken branding to a whole new realm) -- have produced a new and equally irresistible gimmick.

This time around, as noticed by AllThingsD's Mike Isaac, it's a change to the Google home page's iconic "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.

When you mouse-over the button, it "spins" like the display on a slot machine and stops on any one of several "I'… Read more

Move over, Microsoft. Your record as the most valuable public company ever has been topped.

Apple today set a new mark as the most valuable publicly traded company of all time, reaching more than $622 billion in market capitalization, a measure of a company's stock price times the number of shares it has outstanding.

Microsoft had long held the record for the most valuable public company, having hit $618.9 billion at the end of 1999. Since then, the software giant has watched its market cap fall to its current $258.2 billion.

Apple reached the $600 billion market … Read more

A report suggests that Microsoft offloaded around 20 percent of its shares in Facebook just after the social network went public. In doing so, the software giant received $249 million back -- close to $10 million more than it first invested.

The Redmond, Wash.-based company invested $240 million in Facebook in 2007 for a 1.6 percent stake in the social network. Back then it wasn't a huge amount, but was a major boost for Facebook to have a dominant player on its roster. Soon after, Bing Search and Bing Maps were brought to the social network … Read more

Lenovo is on fire.

The PC maker today reported sales of $8 billion during its fiscal quarter that ended June 30, up 35 percent from the $5.9 billion it generated during the same period last year. Lenovo's profit hit $141 million, up from the $108 million it posted in the fiscal first quarter of 2011.

Lenovo's strong performance comes on the back of its soaring PC shipments. The company's notebook shipments rose 27 percent in the fiscal first quarter, helping it to hit a record 15.4 percent market share in that market. On the desktop … Read more

Social media's traffic contribution to online shopping sites increased 77 percent in one year, but few users actually buy anything, according to a new report published today by marketing firm Monetate.

The firm's study shows that search engine and e-mail referrals are more than holding their own against social media sites when it comes to generating sales in the second quarter of 2012.

Social media sites only contributed to 2.85 percent of online shopping traffic in the second quarter, but the figure did grow a substantial 77 percent from the beginning of 2011 to the beginning of … Read more

SecondMarket, which facilitates equity transactions for non-public companies, said today that the typical company on its service is awfully large -- and focused on consumers.

According to the firm, the typical private company on SecondMarket has a $329 million market cap and average funding of $108 million. The company has been in operation for seven years and has about 200 employees.

Digging deeper into its data, SecondMarket found that 48.3 percent of the companies involved in so-called liquidity events, or transactions of some form, came from the gaming industry. Another 21.8 percent of those companies were involved in … Read more

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- To help tell the story of how it came up with the iPhone and the iPad, Apple enlisted the same man it uses to sell the products to potential customers.

Apple's marketing chief, Phil Schiller, who is a frequent face at the company's product launches, retold the creation story of the iPhone and the iPad -- a slightly expanded version of the tale jurors heard during the company's opening statements earlier this week. He also gave the world a glimpse of a secret portion of Apple's marketing strategy -- how much it … Read more

Things are not looking good for PC makers in the age of the iPad.

Market researcher Canalys makes this point with PC shipment stats, which are a function of the way it sees the PC market. In short, tablets are PCs too. (And note Canalys defines "PC" generically, not the traditional definition of a Windows PC.)

That gives Apple an overwhelming lead over No.2 Hewlett-Packard. In the second quarter, Apple shipped about 21 million PCs versus about 13.5 million for HP, according to a Canalys report released today. Lenovo was a close third with 13.1 … Read more