The report found that the total value of global technology mergers and acquisitions declined by 35 percent in 2012. While at first this seems startling, the good news is that the deal value for the fourth quarter is only down 4 percent as compared to last year, and deal volume remained consistent.

“Back in 2011, there were a couple deals in the third quarter worth over $10 billion,” said Joe Steger, head of Global M&A at Ernst & Young in an interview with VentureBeat. “This year, the largest deal was only $5 billion. This means that we are seeing some caution in the marketplace due to valuations and macrocosmic uncertainty that made buyers reluctant to do large transformative deals.”

The deals that did occur were on a smaller scale. In most cases, the activity surrounded nontechnology companies buying technology companies to adapt quickly to a changing market. Larger companies that operate using older models often find it more beneficial to acquire startups to make use of their technology rather than to build it from within.

“Companies are very interested in doing smaller, strategic deals to get a leg up and improve their stance in some f these newer and emerging technologies that are a driving orce iwhtin the sector,” Steger said. “Tech is becoming a more-and-more important enabler in other sectors as a way for businesses to meet their objectives.

Most of the acquired companies work in cloud computing and Software-as-a-Serivce, as well as big data analytics, smart mobility, social networking, advertising and marketing, security, payments, and health care IT. While they are driving the market, valuation gaps are contributing to its decline.

“We still have the whole lifecycle of tech and disruptive innovation, and the continuing proliferation of new startups coming up, being funded by venture capital, and looking for exit through M&A,” Steger said. “That doesn’t change. But if you’ve got buyers and sellers that are out of line when it comes to valuation, certainly that can impact the whole ecosystem.

Cross-border deal volume saw significant decrease in 2012, as compared to 2011, but the value rose. Americans dominated the social, mobile, cloud, and “big data” analytics while the online and mobile video and games were the most significant driver in the Asia-Pacific region and Japan. In Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, cloud/SaaS, smart mobility, and social networking propelled most of the activity.

Ultimately, Steger’s takeaway is that we may be “nearing the bottom” and as confidence in the economy returns and valuations get back in line with expectations during the first half of 2013, M&A values will go up in the second part of the year.

Both in the U.S and globally, people are accessing the web more frequently and for longer periods, using smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, and smart TVs. We’re still using PCs as well, but personal computer usage of social media is just about the only category that’s down: 4 percent fewer Americans connected to the Internet via a PC in 2012, while 82 percent more connected via the mobile web and 85 percent more connected via a mobile app.

Source: Nielsen

Mobile app and mobile web use were both up — way up.

Overall, total time on the Internet in 2012 is up 21 percent to 520 minutes a month. A staggering 17 percent of that is spent on one service: Facebook.

And it’s social networks that are seeing huge growth, with 85.5 million accessing social networks via a smartphone or tablet app in July 2012 versus 44.8 million in July 2011, and 81.1 million using the mobile web in July 2012 compared to 43 million in July 2011. PC use is still the largest, with 171.8 million Americans using a laptop or desktop machine to get social online, but that’s just slightly up from 163.6 million in 2011.

Interestingly, while Facebook’s PC’s audience declined by 4 percent in 2012, Twitter’s grew 13 percent. Google+ grew 80 percent, and Pinterest grew 1,047 percent, but that has a lot more to do with the growth cycles of those two sites than transformative change in how users are accessing them. Facebook’s app audience increased by 88 percent, and its mobile web audience increased by 85 percent, more than offsetting the slight PC decline, and underscoring Facebook’s recent efforts to monetize its mobile services.

Another insight from Nielsen: Pinterest’s growth flattened — and even disappeared in early 2012. It had grown from an audience of perhaps 2.5 million in July 2011 to almost 25 million in February 2012, but it plateaued at that level for three months, and then actually decreased in May before taking off again in June.

Still, Pinterest is a massive force online, especially among women, who make up 70 percent of its web audience, 84 percent of its app users, and 72 percent of its mobile web audience — and spent about 2.1 billion minutes on the site in 2012.

The second-screen phenomenon is on the increase as well, as TV viewers continue to use Twitter as a way to sound off, comment on, and chat with others about what they are watching:

Almost a quarter of 18- to 34-year-olds comment on social media sites about their TV shows while they’re watching, and the numbers are growing through 2012.

That’s a low percentage, globally, with 47 percent of people in Asia-Pacific countries using a second screen while watching TV, and a staggering 63 percent of people in the Middle East and Africa chatting online while watching.

The surveyors talked to 1998 U.S, adults, but the global component of Nielsen’s report surveyed 28,000 people in 51 countries.

The full report is available from Nielsen.

photo credit: ocean.flynn via photopin cc

For traditional businesses, social media is like a virus: it’s furious, fast-growing, and impossible to ignore.

According to a new survey released by the Stanford Rock Center for Corporate Governance, the Center for Leadership Development and Research at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and The Conference Board, less than a third of companies today use social media for business purposes.

Executives not confidently using sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to support their corporate strategy whether it’s for the purposes of communication, brand management or identifying risk.

In the report, 180 senior executives and corporate directors of North American public and private companies, were surveyed for their opinions on social media. The findings reveal a disconnect between companies’ understanding of social media and how they are applying it to their business.

“Companies appreciate the potential that social media can have to transform all aspects of their business,” said Professor David F. Larcker of the Stanford Graduate School of Business and lead author of the study, in a statement. “They also realize the serious threats that it can pose. They’re just not doing very much about it.”

The key findings from the report include:

• 90 percent of respondents claim to understand the impact that social media can have on their organization but only 32 percent monitor social media to detect risks to their business activities (only 14 percent use metrics from social media to measure corporate performance).
• Only 24 percent of senior managers and 8 percent of directors receive reports containing summary information and metrics from social media. Approximately half of the companies do not collect this information at all.
• Nearly two-thirds of respondents (65 percent) use social media for personal purposes, and 63 percent for business purposes. This demonstrates that executives and board members are familiar with social media.
• Only 59 percent of companies in the survey use social media to interact with customers, 49 percent to advertise, and 35 percent to research customers. About 30 percent use social media for to research competitors, new products and services, or communicate with employees.

To get savvy with social media, the authors of the report recommend that businesses develop a formal set of guidelines for employees and directors, and consider a monitoring or “listening” tool like Sysomos, Sprout Social, or Salesforce-owned Radian6.

Read the full report here

Image via Shutterstock

Venture capital investments declined in both dollars and deal volume this quarter, as time keeps on ticking towards the Mayan predictions of Armageddon and concerns surrounding a burst of the technology bubble.

This insight (regarding venture capital dollars, not the apocalypse) comes from TheMoneyTree report issued quarterly by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association and based on data from Thomson Reuters.

There was an 11% decline in the amount of dollars invested and 5% dip in the number of deals during quarter 3, which extends from July through September. Venture capitalists invested $6.5 billion across 890 deals, as compared to $7.3 billion over 935 deals from quarter 2.

A lull during the summer months is fairly standard. However, these numbers also mark a $450 million drop from quarter 3 last year. The decline spanned all stages of development. Seed stage and early stage investments both fell by over 20% in dollars and accounted for half of the total deal volume. The average seed deal was $2.7 million, half a million less than the average last quarter. The amount of early stage investments also decreased, from $5.2 million to $4.4 million.

“The decline in funding for Seed/Early stage companies is firmly in place – we’ve seen a drop in dollars and deals both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year,” remarked Tracy T. Lefteroff, global managing partner of the venture capital practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers US.  “We’re seeing fewer new venture funds being raised which means less capital is available for new investments.  And, we’re seeing venture capitalists be very cautious with the capital that is available due to the lack of a significant number of liquidity events.  Instead, venture capitalists are continuing to support the companies already in their portfolio.

Of the companies that did manage to raise first time funding, a majority were in the software, media & entertainment, and IT services industries.

Overall, software companies received the highest level of funding, responsible for nearly 1/3 the dollars invested this quarter. This is the fourth out of the past five quarters that investment in the software sector has exceeded $2 billion. The $2.1 billion from this quarter is still 12% less than software investment in Q2. The amount of internet-specific investing also decreased by 12%, although 6 of the top 10 deals for the quarter were in this category.

10 out of 17 of the TheMoneyTree’s categories experienced overall declines, including Telecom and Clean Technology. But it is not all bad news. 7 sectors, including Financial Services, Healthcare Services, Business Products, and Retailing went up.

“The third quarter numbers tell a story consistent with investment themes we have been seeing throughout 2012,” said Mark Heesen, NVCA president.  “Information technology investment continues to be very strong, particularly in the Internet arena while life sciences investment remains low, reflecting ongoing concerns regarding regulatory uncertainty, capital intensity and investment time horizons in the space.”

Even if investment is down, there are still companies raking in millions upon millions of dollars. All except one of the companies in the Top 10 Deals list are expansion or later stage companies, and six are internet companies.

• Square, Inc.    $200,000,000
• Box, Inc      $125,000,200
• Elevance Renewable Sciences, Inc.       $104,360,000
• Fisker Automotive, Inc. $103,667,200
• Fab.com, Inc   $100,800,300
• GitHub, Inc.    $99,500,000
• Social Finance, Inc.    $77,199,900
• JustFabulous, LLC       $76,000,000
• Protean Electric, Ltd.  $72,639,600
• Quirky, Inc.    $68,000,100

60% of the biggest deals happened in California and the usual suspects of Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and New Enterprise Associates cropped up multiple times as the names behind the largest investments.

These numbers portend that 2012 will fall short of 2011 in terms of venture capital activity. I suppose the bright side is that if the apocalypse really does happen in December, the investments in 2012 will surpass those of 2013. Watch out for upswings in dollars going towards zombie-fighting technology and survival kits.

Old people are big on the web, apparently, as AARP web properties jumped 21 percent, Sun Microsystems has risen from the dead, and MySpace continues its slow drop to oblivion as Tumblr elbows its way above yesterday’s social network.

But the biggest jump belongs to Instagram.

The Facebook acquisition and continued execution by the Instagram team translated to 38 percent growth in the month of July. Instagram.com is now the 56th most popular site in the U.S., with 22.7 million unique visitors, up from 16.5 million in June.

And that’s all with a website that contains almost no content besides a blog and developer support, unless you come in via the app or a social network to see an Instagrammed picture directly.

One big surprise in the top gainers: Sun Microsystems.

Apparently it grew 32 percent from 7.7 million to 10.2 million visitors, despite being dead, and sun.com redirecting to Oracle’s website. This is a headscratcher — Sun has been a popular website in the past, but why it is gaining now, and how ComScore is finding this are big question marks.

I asked ComScore for more information, and this is what Andrew Lipsman, the company’s VP of industry analysis, told me:

Sun Microsystems is the web property, and it would include a number of other sites for products that Sun owns. There may have been a software update this month that drove traffic to something under the Sun umbrella.

Tumblr continues to win as it surged past MySpace as the 43rd most popular site in the U.S., and the top slots are held down by the big boys: Google with 190 million uniques, Microsoft with 168 million, Yahoo with 162 million, and Facebook with 160 million.

The next big move is probably Facebook surging past Yahoo and Microsoft sites.

Here’s the top gainers graph:

ComScore top 10 gaining websites July 2012

And the top sites overall:

ComScore July 2012: top websites in the US

photo credit: gogoloopie via photo pin cc

Hat tip: MarketingLand

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The teenage demographic spends the least amount of time watching television, talking on the phone or using personal computers, according to a Nielsen report about how young people engage media. Mobile technology appears to be what they use most.

Teens are using text messages to communicate with their social circle over twice as much as any other demographic, the report states. And teens also watch more mobile video content than any other demographic.

The 12 to 17 age demographic viewed an average of 7 hours 13 minutes of mobile video per month in Q4 2010, while the general population viewed an average of only 4 hours 20 minutes.

Not surprisingly, the report also states that mobile advertising has the greatest impact on teenagers.

It’s a sign that the Web continues to grow, and that the exhaustion of standard IPv4 addresses in February has had no affect on that growth.

In its quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief, Verisign said it recorded 209.8 million top-level domain names on the Internet. 15.3 million new domain names were registered in 2010 — a 7.9 percent increase from the previous year and 2.2 percent over the last quarter.

The most popular domain name extensions, in order, were .com, .de, .net, .uk, .org, .info, .nl, .eu, .cn, and .ru, which accounted for 61 percent of all new registrations. Interestingly, despite the growth in China’s Internet industry, the .cn domain dropped from seventh to ninth place over the last year, making way for Netherlands’ .nl and the European Union’s .eu.

The report also found that out of 107.3 million .com and .net domains, 21 percent were one page websites, 67 percent were multi-page websites, and 12% were parked domains, and an estimated 88 percent resolved to a valid website. It found that the renewal rate for the .com and .net extensions was 73.8 percent, which means that around 28 million of these domain names were released back to the registry this year.

The complete report is available to download as a PDF.

The report, which tracks where Americans spend their time online, attributed initiatives such as Earth Hour, which looks to raise awareness of energy consumption, and the approaching spring break, for the abundant increase in both categories respectively.

Website properties in the green category drew nearly 20 million unique visitors, up 11 percent from 18 million, while the travel category grew 10 percent from 55.7 to 61.3 million visitors. Other categories that followed included online instant messengers, job search, and religion-related websites.

In terms of overall rankings, Yahoo properties ranked highest with 212 million visitors, followed by Google and Microsoft with 176 million, and Facebook with 152 million. New additions to the top 50 list included FoxNews.com, Time Warner, and BuzzMedia.

As for ad networks, Google topped once again with a 91.7% reach to Americans, followed by Yahoo with 84.4%, AOL with 83.8%, and the social media sharing widget ShareThis with 80.9%.

Forrester Research’s North American Technographics survey, conducted in the second quarter of 2009 and 2010, asked participants to state their level of agreement to the statement “I’m very concerned about my privacy on social networking sites.”

Among Gen Y participants, agreement with the statement barely changed, going from 29% to 30%. Gen X showed a slight increase, from 30% to 33%, but the majority of the change in the level of concern occurred among Younger Boomers, 31% to 39%, Older Boomers, 32% to 50%, and Seniors, 28% to 43%.

In short: The change in the level of concern correlated almost directly with the age group.

The media has made much of privacy in the past year, particularly with Facebook. After changing its default privacy settings earlier in the year, the company was on the receiving end of much criticism, finally introducing simpler, albeit more open, controls. More recently, it was accused by the Wall Street Journal of letting third-party applications transmit user information to advertisers. When it rolled out new groups and location features, users complained about the ability for others to add them to groups and announce their location without their permission.

Against that backdrop, the age correlation found in the survey is intriguing. It suggests that the younger generation is relaxed to the point of passivity when it comes to privacy. Is that despite their heavy use of social networks, or because of it?

It may be that privacy concerns are less related to one’s generational cohort than one’s life situation, which changes as one ages. In a world where employers check prospective hires’ Facebook profiles, concern with sharing drunken party photos and edgy status updates may grow.

Then again, having grown up with the Internet around, comfort with sharing online is just a part of the game for Gen X and Gen Y. For the older cohorts, trust and privacy are real ordeals.

Facebook, meanwhile, has been doing its best improve its impaired privacy reputation. The company released a tool last month that lets users download all the information they’ve ever entered into the site — including photos, messages, and status updates. While it hasn’t backed down on letting users automatically add and tag their friends, it does let them opt out of those features.

The world’s biggest social network may well figure out a middle ground on privacy before its first users reach middle age.