Apple notably missed Wall Street’s expectations for the first time in a long time during its last earnings report. But the company changed the release of its iPhone launch schedule by a quarter and consumers were holding out for a new iPhone model, so expectations were simply too high at that time.

Apple righted that with today’s numbers. Here’s a brief look at Apple’s staggering numbers from the first quarter:

Revenue: $46.33 billion, compared to $26.74 billion in the year-ago quarter

Net income: $13.06 billion, compared to $6 billion in the year-ago quarter

Earnings per diluted share: $13.87 per share, compared to $6.43 per share in the year-ago quarter

iPhone sales: 37.04 million units, a 128 percent growth over the year-ago quarter

iPad sales: 15.43 million units, a 111 percent growth over the year-ago quarter

Mac sales: 5.2 million units, a 26 percent growth over the year-ago quarter

iPod sales: 15.4 million units, a 21 percent decline from the year-ago quarter

iTunes store revenue: $1.7 billion ($120 million worth of media and apps sold on Dec. 25 alone)

Apple store revenue: $6.1 billion, up 69 percent from last year ($17.1 million average per store revenue)

Apple-with-money-inside image: Vitaliy Krasovskiy/Shutterstock

The Just Dance franchise has sold more than 25 million units worldwide, publisher Ubisoft announced today. That is a huge success for the dancing game series, and demonstrates the continuing demand for more casual games on home video game consoles.

The latest entry in the series of music rhythm games, Just Dance 3, has sold more than 7 million copies since its release in October and has consistently been in the top five on video game sales charts in both the U.S. and Europe, according to Ubisoft’s internal estimates. Two Just Dance titles finished in the overall U.S. top ten sales chart for 2011, with Just Dance 2 at number 9 and Just Dance 3 at number 2. The overall best selling game of the year was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. According to NPD, the dance genre, driven largely by Just Dance sales, grew 66% over the previous year.

The franchise is available on all three gaming consoles — Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo Wii — and Geoffroy Sardin, chief EMEA sales and marketing officer at Ubisoft, says this variety has helped lead to its success. “Our diverse dance game offerings ensure that everyone can find an accessible and enjoyable title regardless of platform, and that we have a broad base upon which to bring new ideas and titles in the years to come,” he said.

Ubisoft says a collective 23 million minutes a day have been spent striking a pose in Just Dance 3. Many of those minutes have no doubt been contributed by 24-year-old Elizabeth “Kitty McScratch” Bolinger (pictured below), who recently made it into the Guinness World Records 2012 Gamer’s Edition as the “Most Prolific Dancing Game High Scorer.” Bolinger has more than 85 number one high scores in the Just Dance and Dance Central franchises. She says her favorite songs to dance to include “Hot and Cold” by Katy Perry, where she’s scored over 16,000 points blindfolded, and “Bullet Proof” by La Roux.

AMZN, which was trading on the NASDAQ as high as $178 earlier this week, briefly dropped to $167 this morning as analyst Heather Bellini’s note was made public.

As of this writing, AMZN has returned to trading at $173.26. Bellini named a price target — the price at which current investors would be best to exit — of $190 in her note.

“For the stock to materially appreciate in the near term would require the company to beat and raise on the bottom line over the next few quarters,” her note read.

“Given our lower operating forecasts for 2012, we see this scenario as unlikely.”

Taking into account the lower Q4 sales estimate, Amazon’s year-over-year growth is still projected at 38 percent.

On the other hand, Amazon itself is nothing but positive about its Q4 activity. Earlier today, the company countered Bellini’s prediction with news that the 2011 holiday shopping season was Amazon’s best season to date. Online holiday shopping overall amounted to a $35.3 billion market during the last couple months of 2011 alone, and Amazon captured its fair share of that number.

In particular, Amazon’s sales of its Kindle lineup (especially the new Kindle Fire tablet/e-reader hybrid) have been astounding. Throughout November and December, Amazon has been selling roughly one million Kindle units each week. For the entirety of Amazon’s Kindle lineup, Black Friday sales figures quadrupled year over year. At that time, the company also stated the Kindle Fire had been its top-selling product for the previous eight weeks.

The PS Vita sold an estimated 72,479 units Christmas week, compared to 324,859 units sold in the previous week. That’s a drop of nearly 78 percent. The Vita was outsold by older portable devices like its predecessor, the PlayStation Portable (PSP), and the Nintendo 3DS, which has now sold over 4 million units since its debut last year.

While these figures are certainly disappointing for Sony, they may also confirm what analysts have been predicting for some time – that the portable gaming market is shrinking thanks to the rise of tablets and smartphones. “There will always be a large and significant market for dedicated portable gaming, but we do believe it is a shrinking category that will eventually plateau to a sustainable market size for at least two competitors,” EEDAR Vice President of Capital Research and Communications Jesse Divnich recently told VentureBeat.

The PS Vita’s lackluster second week sales could also possibly be attributed to its price. The Wi-Fi model costs 24,980 Yen ($320), while the 3G/Wi-Fi model costs 29,980 Yen ($385). When the Vita hits store shelves in the U.S. on February 22, it will cost $249 and $299 respectively. Sony has been under pressure to cut its price since rival Nintendo cut the price of the 3DS to as low as $169 back in August, though this too was due to an initial mediocre reception.

Sony, however, is standing by its price point. “We have a very good product at a very affordable price,” Sony President of Consumer & Products Services Kazuo Hirai told Bloomberg earlier this year. “There’s no need to lower the price just because somebody else that happens to be in the video game industry decided they were going to.”

Media Create’s hardware sales chart for Dec. 19 – Dec. 25 can be found below:

System | This Week | Last Week | Last Year |        YTD |   Last YTD |         LTD
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3DS    |   482,200 |   367,691 |         0 |  4,084,190 |          0 |   4,084,191
PSP    |   101,121 |    64,468 |   177,691 |  2,016,406 |  2,798,338 |  18,666,617
WII    |    91,176 |    60,916 |   131,761 |    850,375 |  1,597,131 |  12,130,013
PS3    |    75,943 |    65,119 |    64,228 |  1,481,696 |  1,509,700 |   7,569,186
PSV    |    72,479 |   324,859 |         0 |    397,338 |          0 |     397,338
NDS    |    14,396 |     9,155 |   191,583 |    651,985 |  2,772,043 |  32,802,684
360    |     4,245 |     3,584 |     5,298 |    113,095 |    207,118 |   1,533,592
PS2    |     1,582 |     1,400 |     2,604 |     76,355 |     83,439 |  21,772,448
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ALL    |   843,142 |   897,192 |   573,165 |  9,671,440 |  8,967,769 |  98,956,069
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PSP    |   101,121 |    64,468 |   177,691 |  2,000,866 |  2,722,751 |  18,490,652
DSiXL  |     8,470 |     5,600 |    92,329 |    343,379 |  1,392,878 |   2,290,963
DSi    |     5,894 |     3,523 |    93,464 |    287,911 |  1,156,743 |   5,831,632
DSL    |        32 |        32 |     5,790 |     20,695 |    222,422 |  18,094,618

The company says more than 800,000 of the 960,000 consoles sold this week were sold within a period of 24 hours. More than 750,000 Kinect sensors were also sold this week, both bundled with the 360 console and as a standalone product. The current holiday sales season is critical for game companies, as 40 percent to 50 percent of game revenues are generated in November and December.

Retailers like Best Buy see these sales figures as a testament to the continued popularity of gaming. “Xbox 360 was among the best-sellers at Best Buy this Black Friday,” said Chris Homeister, senior vice president and general manager of Home Entertainment at Best Buy. “We have seen tremendous excitement from customers for our hot holiday gaming offers.”

With a robust holiday portfolio, an updated Xbox Live dashboard and the launch of Xbox Live’s new TV service on Dec. 6, Microsoft says it expects the holiday momentum to continue, driving Xbox 360 to finish the year as the number one console in the U.S.

Nintendo announced earlier that its flagship games The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword and Super Mario 3D Land sold more than 500,000 units each through the Black Friday holiday.

Kinect’s strongest month in Japan was December 2010, when it sold 43,200 units, but over the past six months, sales have dropped to an average of less than 3,000 per month. Japan remains a strategic market for Microsoft, as it is still one of the largest video game markets in the world. But it’s not surprising, given that Microsoft hardware has always sold poorly in Japan.

Chris Lewis, Microsoft’s vice president of interactive entertainment, spoke to Eurogamer recently about the company’s struggles in the Japanese market, but he remained upbeat about the future of Kinect in Japan, saying “Nintendo, particularly with the Wii, have opened up a market opportunity there. We’ve leapfrogged that handheld technology with Kinect. What we’re seeing is users love using their own body without worrying about how to work a controller. So we see ourselves as, frankly, a company that does bring an awful lot of firsts, and we’ve enjoyed fabulous success with Kinect.”

These disappointing first-year hardware sales figures don’t support this vision of a bright future for Kinect in Japan though, and the first year Kinect software sales figures are equally disappointing. Only Kinect Adventure! sold more than 25,000 units, and that was because it came bundled with the Kinect system. Supposed ‘system sellers’ such as Dance Central and Kinect Animals (Kinectimals in the US) came in with sales of just 8,690 and 5,350 respectively. The highly rated Child of Eden, created by Tetsuya Mizuguchi, the man behind such classic titles as Rez, Space Channel 5 and Sega Rally Championship, didn’t even make the top ten, meaning it sold less than 3,470 units. The top ten Kinect games in Japan over the last twelve months read as follows:

• 01. Kinect Adventure! 114,000 sales
• 02. Forza Motorsport 4: 24,900
• 03. DanceEvolution: 22,400
• 04. Kinect Sports: 13,000
• 05. You Shape Fitness Evolved: 12,300
• 06. Dance Central: 8,690
• 07. Kinect Animals: 5,350
• 08. New Brain Training 4,930
• 09. Sonic Free Riders: 4,160
• 10. Fighters Uncaged: 3,470

While worldwide sales of the Kinect hardware have been strong, with over 10 million unit sales so far, there are concerns that 8 million of those came within the first two months of release. Tony Key, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Ubisoft, which published Child of Eden, has his own thoughts on this sales trend: “ It’s not healthy to just sell in the holiday, or 90 percent of your units in the holidays. We would really like to see them [Microsoft] have some major launches during the non-holiday part of the year. That will help keep the visibility of the machine high and enable better catalog sales throughout the year.”

In spite of these problems, Kinect seems integral to Microsoft’s ongoing Xbox 360 strategy, with the new Xbox Live Dashboard, which plays heavily on voice and motion controls, launching on December 6. Microsoft are also reportedly planning to release a Kinect 2 device, that will be significantly more powerful than its predecessor, enabling games to lip read, detect when players are angry, and determine in which direction they are facing. According to Eurogamer, this Kinect 2 device will come bundled with all future Xbox consoles , and may bypass the existing USB connectivity in order to help improve performance.

Around 10:20 on Thanksgiving night, the unidentified woman shot pepper spray inside the store when the coverings were lifted off items she intended to purchase.

“Somehow she was trying to use it to gain an upper hand,” police Lt. Abel Parga told The Associated Press.

The use of the chemical agent appears to have set off a small panic in the store, resulting in 20 minor injuries, according to fire department officials who said that “rapid crowd movement” was to blame for the injuries.

The store remained open after the incident, and people on the scene continued to shop, though many probably wish they had made their purchases online instead.

The woman fled the scene, according to police, and we can assume she didn’t get her Black Friday discounts.

via Washington Post. Hat tip: Anup

Image via mag3737/Flickr

The company launched digital distribution, iDevice and gaming tablet businesses earlier this year and says they are significantly contributing to its gross margin expansion. Console digital sales rose 63 percent, while PC digital sales grew 51 percent. Investment in digital and emerging businesses is part of a long-term strategic plan the company has developed over the last three years and GameStop chief executive Paul Raines said during today’s earnings call it will supplement GameStop’s retail business this holiday season.

GameStop reports total sales for Q3 2011 were $1.95 billion, up 2.5 percent compared to $1.90 billion in the third quarter of 2010. However, lower than expected sales of new software, which Raines attributes to cash-strapped consumers, led to a 0.6 percent decrease in total company comparable store sales. The company expects comparable store sales to range from flat to 2.0 percent in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2011. Net earnings were also down for the third quarter, $53.9 million compared to $54.7 million during the same time period last year.

On a positive note, Raines says he is expecting a good start to the holiday season thanks to strong sell-through of new title releases in November like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, which recently broke sales records by earning $775 million in five days for publisher Activision Blizzard.

JPMorgan analyst Douglas Anmuth stated in a research note he thinks the e-commerce company can move 5 million of the Android-based units during Q4.

The 7-inch color, touchscreen, email-fetching, app-running, web-browsing gadget sells for $199, making it the perfect downmarket competitor to the iPad 2, which starts at $499.

And for gift-giving holiday shoppers, the Fire and its ilk (such as the Kobo Vox and Nook Color) represent a great compromise between flashy functionality and recession-friendly pricing.

The highly anticipated Fire will be available for sale starting November 15. On the day of the Kindle Fire announcement, Amazon took 95,000 pre-orders for the gadget. The Nook Color is on sale now. Kobo will start shipping Vox units later this week.

For contrast, Apple sold around 4.7 million iPad units in the second quarter, when its iPad 2 launched. The company stated it was selling the units as fast as it could make them.

While the Fire is more consumer-friendly in its pricing, it also faces more competition in its vertical and price range than does the iPad. Between the Nook and Kobo competing products, the new breed of color, touchscreen e-readers are mighty similar to tablets in their functionality, and it would be difficult to say which of the three is best in class.

Anmuth also predicted consumers will see multiple Kindle Fire variants next year, including 7-inch and 10-inch models and 3G connectivity options.

Apple sold 17.07 million iPhones during its fourth quarter — a 21 percent jump from a year ago, but well below the near 20 million units some analysts were expecting. But those numbers didn’t include the more than 4 million iPhone 4S units Apple sold over its launch weekend, which will be counted towards the next quarter.

Based on early iPhone 4S estimates, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster predicted earlier this month that Apple could sell 25 million iPhones for its holiday quarter. But that estimate came before we saw the iPhone 4S’s smashing performance, which means Apple could end up selling well beyond that.

And don’t forget that the iPhone 4S is now on three US carriers for the first time, which will certainly lead to a significant sales bump.

So what was the cause of the slower than expected iPhone sales this quarter? Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer blames pervasive iPhone rumors over the past few months, which kept many consumers from buying the iPhone 4, according to Wall Street Journal reporter Kelly Evans. I could certainly see how that could be true — many iPhone rumors over the past year have been both confusing and contradictory, which likely led to the initial disappointment gadget enthusiasts had when the iPhone 4S was announced.

But the more likely reason sales slowed down was because consumers have been trained to expect a new iPhone during the summer, not at the beginning of fall. Savvy consumers likely held off on upgrading their older iPhones until they saw the new model. And once they did, they jumped on it like hungry wolves.

Amazon is selling the entire lineup of Verizon Wireless smartphones for a penny each with a 2-year contract this week — all except for the Apple iPhone 4S of course, which is launching today.

This is an great deal for those looking for a 4G-LTE-enabled Android phone on Verizon, such as the truly awesome Motorola Droid Bionic. If you try to buy the Droid Bionic direct from Verizon’s website, the phone costs $300, while the BlackBerry Bold 9930 (for some reason) retails for $250.

Some other cool phones worth considering from Verizon include the HTC Thunderbolt 4G, Motorola Droid 3 Global, LG Revolution 4G and the HTC Droid Incredible 2. All of these devices have an ideal use case, so look carefully and find the right one for you. Amazon’s sale ends on 11:59 p.m. PDT on Oct. 17.

The huge Amazon sale could be an attempt to counter all the Apple iPhone 4S hype. It’s unclear if the sale will detract any of the masses who have swarmed to buy an iPhone 4S this weekend, but we don’t blame Amazon for trying.

Apple announced this morning it registered pre-orders for more than 1 million iPhone 4S phones in 24 hours, well beyond its previous record of 600,000 phones. New estimates peg the initial weekend’s sales to be somewhere north of 3 million, according to RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky. That means Apple could sell more than 25 million iPhones in its fourth operating quarter this year, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said.

The last time Apple launched an iPhone, it was only available on AT&T. Apple opened the iPhone 4 up to Verizon Wireless in February this year. This time around, Apple is launching the phone on the three largest wireless carriers in the United States simultaneously, with the addition of Sprint. The iPhone 4 sold out in around 17 hours when it launched on Verizon Wireless in January. It also sold out in less than 24 hours on AT&T when it launched in June last year.

The iPhone 4S sports significant hardware upgrades, though it looks identical to the iPhone 4. The phone runs Apple’s A5 dual-core processor and reportedly has more memory. It also has an 8-megapixel camera, compared to the iPhone 5′s 5-megapixel camera. Apple normally releases a new phone every year, but the company atypically released the iPhone 4S later this year, just after its most recent operating quarter ended September 25.

Pre-orders for the iPhone 4S began Friday last week. The company will start shipping the phone this Friday Oct. 14. It’s available with a new 2-year contract for $199, $299 and $399 for the 16GB, 32GB and 64GB models of the phone respectively. The phone is available on AT&T, Sprint and Verizon Wireless.  The iPhone 4S will make its worldwide debut October 14 in United States, Australia, Japan, Canada, France, Germany and the U.K.

Death of a sales cycle

Most companies are very familiar with the concept of a sales cycle (the sales process and tunnel/funnel). Companies track prospective customers as leads through distinct stages and predict revenue based on potential sales as things currently stand. Up until recently, that was the best way for businesses to model revenue.

However, a sales cycle model on its own presents distinct problems and shortcomings when trying to drive sustained revenue growth in today’s increasingly social world for a couple of major reasons (and goes the heart of why corporations are literally leaving trillions of dollars on the revenue table).

• It’s insufficient: The sales cycle model remains stuck on near-term revenue opportunities, based what’s happening with current accounts.
• It’s inefficient: The sales cycle starts tracking revenue when a lead is accepted into sales, ignoring the time and expense spent on the lead by marketing before and during the sales cycle. As anyone who has planned an exotic vacation or purchased a new flat screen TV knows that in today’s market, the buyer explores dozens of online and social channels before they ever speak to a sales rep. That research, interest and outreach is not taken into consideration in a traditional sales cycle.

Birth of a revenue cycle

Contrary to the old sales cycle, the modern revenue cycle includes the parts of the business that feed and foster sales: marketing, branding, PR and social media. This bigger-picture process makes it possible to take this part of the business that has long been a cost center, and transform it into a true revenue driver.

Take marketing, for example. Incorporating marketing into a holistic revenue cycle means not just shooting in the dark and proving ROI later, but instead standardizing and tracking information with sales for the common goal of accelerated revenue generation. This new process, called revenue performance management (RPM), is a modern way of looking at marketing and sales together. The technologies that power RPM are rapidly gaining adoption among companies of all sizes and across every industry precisely because they deliver proven results.

In some respects, RPM is a no-brainer that’s time has finally come. In others, properly implementing RPM requires dedication and a degree of sophistication to get the best possible results. Still, it can’t be denied that there have been some major shifts between that make it both critically necessary and technically possible for companies of all shapes and sizes to take control of their revenue cycles by bringing marketing and sales together.

Today’s buyer demands RPM

Before the Internet, sales organizations actually had a chance to influence customers’ buying decisions. Now, buyers have a wealth of information at their fingertips and form their purchasing preferences well before they ever connect with a sales rep. We’ve gone from a limited number of powerful communication channels to a vast and fragmented Web-marketing world, bringing with it both opportunities and challenges.

Technological advances in cloud software — including marketing automation, business analytics, cloud-based CRM, sales intelligence and social media monitoring tools — have all been crucial to supporting the capture and flow of information from marketing to sales. They are equally as important to determining revenue impact.

For example, only recently has it been possible (or necessary) for a company to compare ROI across hundreds different marketing programs to base future marketing investment on the quality of resulting sales leads. Smart companies are now taking advantage of quickly proliferating marketing channels to reach, influence and track the interest of their prospective customers early in the revenue cycle. But with nearly infinite marketing options available, they must measure what works and what doesn’t to consistently accelerate their revenue engine. By optimizing interactions across every touch point, and aligning sales and marketing to operate at high velocity, RPM gives businesses the ideal roadmap to help leaders capitalize on the changes taking place in today’s social, mobile and web-driven marketplace to accelerate yearly growth by 40 percent.

Get going on your new revenue cycle

How can you take advantage of this shift in your organization today? Here are a few actions I suggest:

• Establish an infrastructure where sales and marketing are fully integrated and equally responsible for revenue generation.
• Hire a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). Many organizations are already doing this to bring together sales and marketing in an efficient way. That means one person responsible for the entire revenue cycle (money invested in marketing, capitalized on by sales, and then reinvested into marketing). The performance and continual improvement of that business process should be the responsibility of the CRO.
• Establish lead scoring thresholds to identify when leads should be passed on to sales and when they should be returned to marketing for further nurturing Identify. This removes defects and increases sales and marketing effectiveness and efficiency.
• Identify contribution to revenue for marketing campaigns and scrap those that are underperforming. In the same vein, determine which channels and campaigns are the most effective investments and increase investment accordingly.

What to Expect with RPM

A good revenue performance management process should result in high revenue growth out the gate. In our case, Marketo grew revenue by 315 percent in 2010 and we’re well on our way to making 2011 another record-breaking year — growing revenue 140 percent last quarter alone.

The numbers speak for themselves. Now it’s your turn. Seize the day and incite a revenue revolution at your company!

Phil is a 30-year Silicon Valley veteran and has the scars (and a couple of successful IPOs) to prove it. Prior to Marketo, he was President and COO of Epiphany, a public enterprise software company known for its visionary marketing products. Before that, Phil was COO and SVP of Products and Services at Red Brick Systems, a pioneering data warehouse vendor. Earlier, Phil held leadership positions at Metaphor Computer Systems, Stanford University Medical Center, and Masstor Systems. Phil holds a BA from Stanford University.

[Top image via Kirill Kurashov/Shutterstock]

Online shopping has become a staple of our consumer life. Sites like Amazon and eBay reported positive third quarter financial earnings, with Amazon reaching 51 percent net sales over last year. But with all this available product eyeing our wallets, Needle is betting there is need for clarity in whether a brand is right for you.

Needle is, in essence, a chat service, with options for text, video and voice chats. The company installs a Needle button on its various product pages and assigns an “expert” to the page.

“You’re talking to the guy who actually rides mountain bikes, or who uses avalanche ski gear,” Morgan Lynch, chief executive of Needle told VentureBeat.

Needle crowdsources its representatives completely, but Lynch prefers to call it “fan sourcing.” According to him, Needle experts are people who are already visible on the internet and are passionate about a certain topic. They raise their hands, they blog, they go to forums. But they are not customer service representatives, and Needle doesn’t expect them to fill those shoes. Instead, they are dedicated to sales only, to show knowledge of a product and be able to point people toward other products as well.

One of those products is sportswear company Under Armour, which has already given Needle a boost in “expert” applications. When Under Armour put up a post on its Facebook page, Needle saw 120 applications to be the page expert within a few hours.

So, how do you scale a digital company so reliant on manpower? You pay in points. Needle has gone the way of gamification, and offers points to its experts that can used to buy products they chat about and like. This is a bonus for Needle as well.

“Points are potent because unlike games, [experts] can get more [physical] products and services. If you love active gear, you want more of that gear. That reinforces the passion for what they’re doing and makes them more knowledgeable.”

Needle’s first round of funding helped it scale its current product. Its investors included Josh James of Omniture, Adify co-founders Russell Fradin and Larry Braitman, as well as Lightbank, the venture firm created by Groupon’s co-founders.

“We’re investing the bulk of our technology just in managing people,” said Lynch, who mentioned that most of the company’s first round of funding went toward engineering, which he says is 75 percent of the company. “We’re very good at managing people in the cloud.”

Lynch also mentioned that the company is actively looking for a second round of funding, which he would like to use for marketing and exposure. The company already has interested investors. And with its gamification model and the new retail partners, Lynch is confident in his search for another round of funding and in the crowdsourcing product already.

“No one’s really cracked the code [on crowdsourcing]. A lot of people try doing stuff like this and there’s frankly a lot of dead bodies out there. But you have to have the right model to do it, and we have it.”

Pardot on Wednesday announced that it is adding new social networking features into its already strong marketing automation service.

VentureBeat took a little heat last week when it came to the topic of marketing automation after a seemingly innocuous guest post ended up mischaracterizing some of the biggest players in this emerging space. Needless to say, we’re much more in the know about marketing automation and looking to explore how it can help businesses.

Pardot and competing marketing automation providers like Eloqua, Genius, Marketo and Silverpop make it possible for businesses to improve sales lead generation and use a content management system to better connect businesses to potential customers.

The new features Pardot is introducing today at Dreamforce are focused on using social networks and social data to help businesses find leads with more ease. They’re also designed to help business schedule the dissemination of social content across several networks.

“Social is becoming an increasingly important element in marketing and in what services businesses are demanding,” Pardot co-founder and COO Adam Blitzer told VentureBeat. “Businesses want to share content and better trace who’s responding to that content.”

The first major feature in Pardot’s new social toolbox is social discovery. Through an integration with Qwerly, Pardot can now pull public information and photos automatically from networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to create better prospect lists. Pardot can then display that social data through a new social widget, which can be viewed alongside the dashboards in Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM or NetSuite. Ideally, sales reps will be able to view social profile data before they have to call a lead. (See above for a social profile example.)

The next big social feature Pardot is adding is social sharing. Launching out of beta in September, this feature makes it possible for Pardot’s customers to schedule updates on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn in advance. (Think HootSuite on steroids.) Those posts can then be tracked using Pardot’s existing bit.ly connector and provide data like click-through rates.

Finally, the last new social feature Pardot is putting out is social optimization. Using the data pulled from social media campaigns, Pardot can tell its customers which areas of social media were most effective at reaching the desired people. For example, they could learn their Facebook posts result in more prospect engagement than Twitter posts.

“With this feature, not only can Pardot tell you how many prospects clicked through, but it also it can tell you how many prospects actually generated revenues,” Blitzer said.

All in all, Pardot is partly playing catch up to the evolving demands of businesses who care about social, but it’s also taking the challenge seriously by making their social feature set robust. Ideally, we’ll see even more social integration over time with marketing automation services and see more ways sales teams can use social data to better meet their goals.

Both HP and Best Buy declined to provide an official comment on this story.

Specifically, Best Buy has sold just 25,000 of its 270,000 initial HP TouchPad stock, according to AllThingsD. The news isn’t terribly surprising after HP permanently cut the TouchPad’s price by $100 about a month after its release. The TouchPad 16GB version is now selling for $399 while the 32GB version sells for $499.

HP faces steep competition from the ever-popular iPad and a slew of recent Android-based tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. And it probably hasn’t helped that the TouchPad’s most prominent ad features lesser-known celebrities (in the U.S.) like British comic Russell Brand and boxer/singer Manny Pacquiao. When the product has generally low interest, it’s best to pony up for the biggest celebs you can get.

Although it isn’t selling well, the TouchPad does have decent specs and some interesting features. The 9.7-inch tablet features a dual-core 1.2-GHz Snapdragon processor and a front-facing camera for video conferencing. It also runs the very cool WebOS, which puts Apple’s iOS on the iPad 2 to shame when it comes to multitasking.

Do you think the TouchPad is finished before it can even get started?

The company’s last indie game flash sale generated around $1.8 million during its two-week sales period. That means that the current flash sale is on track to exceed the sales of the company’s last flash sale, in large part thanks to increased visibility on news aggregator sites like Reddit and Hacker News.

Humble Bundle has added a new game to the bundle, as well as a 14-day pass to play indie darling sandbox game Minecraft, to further promote sales. Markus Persson, the developer of Minecraft also known by his Twitter handle “@notch,” is the top contributor for the bundle after paying more than $4,000 for his batch of indie games.

Humble Bundle gives independent developers a way to publicize their games and compete with the major publishers in an industry that regularly churns out triple-A titles. This bundle’s breakout hit is a 2-D 8-bit platformer called VVVVVV, a game where players navigate obstacles by changing the direction of gravity. This quarter’s bundle also features “Crayon Physics Deluxe,” “Cogs,” “Hammerflight” and “And Yet It Moves.”

Much like in the Apple App Store, independent game developers struggle for visibility on distribution systems like Steam and the Xbox Live Arcade. Humble Bundle brought visibility to games like World of Goo — which ended up porting its game to the iPad because it became so popular.

Humble Bundle went through startup incubator Y Combinator after 2009′s Humble Indie Bundle (put out by a group of indie game developers) ended up being a runaway success. The sales let gamers pick up a number of indie games that don’t have copyright protection software.

Gamers can pay whatever they want for a bundle — which could be anywhere from 1 cent to $6,000. Gamers also decide what percentage of the fund goes to charity or to the developers and whether to give Humble Bundle a “tip,” which is around 5 percent by default. If most gamers used the default payment schedule, that means Humble Bundle picked up more than $90,000 in its last indie game flash sale.

This is the third bundle the company has launched. It launched a “Frozenbyte” branded bundle that included games from one specific developer. The company’s first bundle included indie darlings like side-scrolling puzzle game Braid and survival horror game Penumbra.

Last year’s Galaxy S phones, smashing successes in their own right, took 125 days to sell the same number of units. Samsung ended up selling 10 million Galaxy S phones last year, but it looks like the Galaxy S II is going to perform well beyond that this year, according to the projection chart below.

The sales milestone isn’t too surprising since GS2 sales reached 3 million units in its first two months. Right now the phone is only available in South Korea, Japan and Europe. Samsung said last week that the Galaxy S II will finally make its way to the U.S. in August, but there’s still no official release date. I expect it to be available across all four major U.S. carriers, just like its predecessor last year.

The Galaxy S II is currently the king of the hill when it comes to high-end Android phones. The phone sports a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED screen (though the resolution is lower than the iPhone 4 and some 4-inch competitors), a Samsung dual-core processor, and support for near-field communications (NFC) built-in. The latter feature, available only in certain models, makes it primed to take advantage of mobile-payment services like Google Wallet.

As I’ve written previously, the Galaxy S II’s biggest competitor, not surprisingly, will be the iPhone 5 (or whatever else Apple has up its sleeve). It’s certainly going to be an interesting battle over the next few months, but I can’t help but think that Samsung would have been better off delivering the GS2 to the US earlier.

Via GigaOm

Humble Bundle gives independent developers a way to publicize their games and compete with the major publishers in an industry that regularly churns out triple-A titles. This bundle’s breakout hit is a 2-D 8-bit platformer called VVVVVV, a game where players navigate obstacles by changing the direction of the gravity. The bundle has already racked up several hundred sales after only being on sale for a few minutes.

Much like the Apple App Store, independent game developers struggle for visibility on distribution systems like Steam and the Xbox Live Arcade. Humble Bundle brought visibility to games like World of Goo — which ended up porting its game to the iPad because it became so popular. This quarter’s bundle also features “Crayon Physics Deluxe,” “Cogs,” “Hammerflight” and “And Yet It Moves.”

Humble Bundle went through startup incubator Y Combinator after 2009′s Humble Indie Bundle (put out by a group of indie game developers) ended up being a runaway success. The sales let gamers pick up a number of indie games that don’t have copyright protection software.

Gamers can pay whatever they want for bundle — which could be anywhere from 1 cent to $6,000. Gamers also decide what percentage of the fund goes to charity, to the developers and whether to give Humble Bundle a “tip,” which is around 5 percent by default.

Humble Bundle hasn’t disclosed how much money it has made off its sales, but it ended up selling more than $1.8 million worth of game bundles in less than two weeks the first time it launched a game bundle. If most gamers used the default payment schedule, that means Humble Bundle picked up more than $90,000.

This is the third bundle the company has launched. It launched a “Frozenbyte” branded bundle that included games from one specific developer. The company’s first bundle included indie darlings like side-scrolling puzzle game Braid and survival horror game Penumbra.

Entrepreneurs, whether they’re visionary or trying to stake a claim in an existing industry, have always faced the same challenge – commercialization. Before you can take your company to the next level, you need to convince people to buy your product or service.

Every start-up believes it’s catering to a massive potential market, filled with pent-up demand. Prospective customers, when they hear about your vision, say things like “WOW!” and “That’s So Cool”. But when you finally begin shipping product, the percentage of actual buyers compared to the number of folks who were so enthusiastic in the research phase is dishearteningly small.

So what do customers say when they really are going to buy? The answer lies more in the questions they ask, than the comments they make. Here are three customer-driven questions to listen for that are definitional of a customer who really is going to buy:

Could I…? – This is a very, very different question than “does your product do X or Y or have Z features?”  (That question is really just your customer looking for a reason not to buy)

You will hear your customer ask a stream of ‘Could I…?’ questions when, in his mind, he has already bought your product. He completely understands what it was designed to do as he lives with the problem it solves, everyday. ‘Could I…?’ is him already envisioning exactly how he will improve the way he gets his job done using your product. He is designing your product in to his processes, and better than you ever could. He will sell himself – so when you hear it, don’t distract him by jabbering on about all the other features. Your only response to ‘Could I…?’ should be “yes, you can”.

How is what you have better than what we’ve built ourselves? – If you’ve been asked this question – just smile and know that this deal is yours to lose. There is no greater validation of customer demand than the presence of a homegrown system or product.

Homegrowns are built when customers have given up trying to find a vendor with the right solution for a problem that they need solved. Generally, they’re scripts of code that are seemingly duct-taped together. They’re inherently kluge, always expensive to maintain, and never really solve the real problem.

But everyone who builds a homegrown soon realizes it has become it’s own problem. Homegrowns are never purpose-built. Your product was. It was designed to fix the right problem the right way. This customer will do whatever it takes to close that deal for you!

Exactly what does your support contract promise? – If you hear this key phrase, recognize that your customer just took the wheel and is driving the deal forward – so don’t get in the way. Realize that the deal is no longer about the product and its capabilities. It’s about the ‘final half’ of the deal – support.

Customers will buy a lesser quality product if they believe the support behind it will be great. This customer needs to believe that the reward of buying your product, which she has never known before, is greater than the risk of living with a problem she knows all too well.

Over deliver on support concerns and you’ll seal the deal.

“The size and dollar value for this transaction is unprecedented, as was the significant interest in the portfolio among major companies around the world,” said George Riedel, Chief Strategy Officer and President of Business Units at Nortel, in a statement.

The consortium—which also includes Sony, Ericsson, and EMC—will now have access to more than 6,000 patents that relate to all manner of technologies, including 4G LTE wireless capabilities, Wi-Fi, semiconductors, and social networking. The six companies beat out Google and Intel, which were both also bidding.

The exact breakdown of which company paid what price in the agreement is unclear at this time. But at the very least, we do know that RIM ponied up $770 million, while Ericsson paid $340 million.

Apple, Microsoft, and RIM will likely be able to use to the patents to shore up their reserves and protect themselves from other lawsuits. Apple, for example, has been in a bitter infringement suit with Samsung since April.

Google is the biggest loser in the sale, as it wanted the patents to help fend off lawsuits and infringement cases associated with its Android mobile OS. Google was even the first bidder on the patents with a $900 million bid. Intel also lost, but the stakes for the company were far less than Google’s.

“No major industry player is as needy in terms of patents as Google,” wrote Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents. “There are already 45 patent infringement lawsuits surrounding Android and makers of Android-based devices have to pay royalties to dozens of right holders.”

Nortel filed for bankruptcy protection in January 2009, and since then it has been selling off its assets. The $4.5 billion deal will be official as long as it receives approval from Canadian and U.S. courts, which have scheduled a joint hearing for July 11.

Update: Google sent us an official statement concerning the purchase of the Nortel patents by Apple, Microsoft, RIM, and company:

“This outcome is disappointing for anyone who believes that open innovation benefits users and promotes creativity and competition. We will keep working to reduce the current flood of patent litigation that hurts both innovators and consumers.”

If Nortel accepts Google’s offer, the search giant would gain patents related to wired, wireless, and other communications technologies, including Wi-Fi, social networking, and LTE. Google would likely use these patents to help protect Android from litigation, such as Oracle’s suit against Android in August 2010.

Nortel filed for bankruptcy protection in January 2009, and since that time it has been selling off individual units and assets. Google’s bid is the floor for all bidding, so the likes of Apple and RIM would be allowed to submit their own higher bids if approved by the Justice Department.

On Monday, Microsoft filed objections to Google buying the patents, suggesting that Google could change the terms of Microsoft’s previously established royalty-free license of Nortel’s patents. AT&T, Verizon, HP, and Nokia have all filed objections as well, according to the Journal.

It was also previously reported that U.S. antitrust regulators had concerns about Apple acquiring Nortel’s patent portfolio because Apple could stifle competition. Having control over LTE patents, for example, would give Apple a substantial bargaining chip when talking to a wireless carrier offering the iPhone or iPad on its network.

During its earnings call today, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer made it clear that the company simply couldn’t make enough iPads: “We sold every iPad 2 we could make,” he said.

COO Tim Cook also dispelled assumptions that the Japanese earthquake had anything to do with Apple’s iPad supply trouble, saying on the call that the company “did not have any supply or cost impact” over the last three months. Cook went on to say that Apple will “produce a very large number [of iPads] for the quarter,” but he’s still unsure if that will meet consumer demand.

When asked to elaborate on what exactly is keeping up iPad production, Apple just mentioned that it’s still working through its backlog of production (Cook described it as “the mother of all backlogs”). The company also hinted to another caller that it had trouble projecting production for the iPad versus iPad 2, something that needed to be done well ahead of time.

Apple’s iPad shipments this past quarter were higher than the first two quarters that the iPad was available, but significantly lower than the 7.5 million units that Apple shipped over the holiday period. With the launch of the iPad 2 in March, Apple was definitely aiming higher than last year’s iPad launch with availability in more retails stores in the US, as well more countries internationally. At the end of March, Apple launched the iPad 2 in additional 25 countries, which put an additional stress on demand.

Let’s face it:  marketing and sales usually don’t play nice.  Like siblings, they behave for the neighbors (clients and partners), but behind closed doors it’s the blame game.  Marketing says sales does a poor job turning leads into customers; sales says marketing provides lousy leads in the first place.

To change this dynamic, all that a clever entrepreneur needs are the right tools, some guidance and a little motivation. In this day and age, innovative technology and a little forward-looking thinking can settle the sales/marketing sibling rivalry once and for all. Here are five ways to make the two work better together.

The perfect prospect – Marketing generates quality leads and gives them to sales. Simple, right? It should be, but there’s no such thing as a perfect prospect. The first step in lead qualification–evaluating a lead–is establishing the definition of your company’s perfect lead.  Marketing and sales should each have its own criteria in mind… but be open to hearing the other group’s thoughts as well. This way, marketing will gain an understanding of what sales is looking for, and sales will trust marketing to set them up with worthwhile prospects. Once this is established, marketing should have no problem filtering through the noise and hooking sales up with great leads.

Let them make the first move – A start-up with limited resources can’t afford to have its sales team making cold calls all day.  That’s why marketing needs to deliver qualified leads – prospects that actively sought information about your company and product. Pairing a solid content strategy with some behind-the-scenes tracking software, marketing can find the leads that are responding positively to campaigns.

Hold their hand – Even if sales and marketing work well together, things can go wrong.  Sales, for instance, may keep getting the same response from leads:  “We’re not ready to to make a decision.”

Because sales is most concerned with meeting this month’s quota, they toss these “bad” leads aside and move on.  The leads may have been good, but the timing wasn’t right.  Marketing can step in with a little bit of technology and help sales put these leads on a nurturing program. If you encourage prospects – without pushing to hard – you can keep those leads warm until they are ready to become customers.

Change your game – Once your start-up is growing, you’re going to start getting interest from clients in industries outside of your comfort zone. This is a great sign of progress and success, but it also means it’s time for a new game plan. Sales isn’t going to be successful using the same messaging for these prospects.

Entrepreneurs can overcome this issue by going back to step one (define the perfect lead), but this time, develop multiple lead profiles that address the characteristics of customers from each industry you’re targeting.  The marketing team can then build customized materials for each profile, and sales can create a more tailored pitch.

This place has the best leads in town – After a while, it’s going to become evident that your best leads come from a few key sources. Try to establish these channels as soon as possible and capitalize on them.

With a lengthy sales cycle and so many leads coming in, it might be hard to track from where the best ones originated.  Fortunately, this is the information age and you can take advantage of software designed to easily track ROI throughout the sales cycle.  Marketing should spend time evaluating each source and then allocate spending accordingly, eliminating inefficient channels.

The figure comes from Scott Sutherland, an analyst at Wedbush Securities. To offer a comparison, the original iPad sold over 300,000 units in its first 24 hours.

Over the weekend, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster found that Apple likely sold out of its iPad 2 stock, with 70 percent of purchases going to buyers new to the iPad. And if you wanted an iPad 2 this weekend, you definitely had to buy it in stores, since online orders faced delays of three to four weeks.

Sutherland’s numbers are still far from official, but it wouldn’t be too surprising for Apple to sell so many iPad 2s. At the moment, it’s difficult to find the tablet in stock at any Apple, Verizon, or AT&T store. And as Reuters mentions, Best Buy said on Friday that some stores sold out of the iPad 2 and its accessories within a mere 10 minutes.

The iPad 2 went on sale at 5pm local time across the country last Friday. Reviewers, not surprisingly, generally had positive things to say about it, even though it’s not a revolutionary improvement over the first iPad.

BGR was given sales totals from five Apple stores (including “two very, very prominent” stores) for the first five days of the Verizon iPhone’s availability. While the Verizon iPhone started with a big lead on its February 10 launch day (909 sales versus AT&T’s 539), that slowly narrowed over the next few days to a slight lead (711 Verizon iPhone’s sold on Monday Feb. 14, versus 618 AT&T units).

Given all of the hype surrounding the Verizon iPhone (which, admittedly, we contributed to), many expected it to outsell its AT&T counterpart to a greater degree. Still, this data is only from five stores — the nationwide outlook could be significantly different (although the lack of long lines during the Verizon iPhone’s launch was somewhat telling).

Here’s the full sales data leaked to BGR (again, just from 5 Apple stores):

• Thursday: Verizon = 909, AT&T = 539
• Friday: Verizon = 916, AT&T = 680
• Saturday: Verizon = 660, AT&T = 471
• Sunday: Verizon = 796, AT&T = 701
• Monday: Verizon = 711, AT&T = 618

The site also reports that preorders for the Verizon iPhone, which sold out in less than 24 hours after being made available, accounted for about 550,000 units. Just two early morning hours of Verizon iPhone preordering ended up breaking the carrier’s first day sales records.

BGR also had some updated statistics to report: 30 percent of Verizon iPhone buyers came from Android, 25 percent came from BlackBerry, and only 14 percent jumped from the AT&T iPhone.

The 2 million figure apparently refers to Galaxy Tab units that the company has shipped to retailers and wireless companies, not units to actual customers, Samsung’s head of mobile marketing Young-hee Lee revealed in its earnings call on Friday.

It’s not unusual for companies to give out shipment numbers, but most take care not to confuse those with sales numbers to consumers. Microsoft, for example, announced last week that it shipped 2 million Windows Phone 7 units, but it was clear to point out that those numbers didn’t represent devices in consumer’s hands.

When pushed by an analyst to reveal more accurate sales numbers, Lee said that sales to consumers were “quite small” — a statement that she’s probably regretting at the moment.

Lee used the terms “sell-in” to designate the company’s sales to distributors and “sell-out” to describe distributor sales to consumers, in her response to the analyst (as quoted by the WSJ):

Well, your question was on sell-in and sell-out. As you heard, our sell-in was quite aggressive and this first quarterly result was quite, you know, fourth-quarter unit [figure] was around two million. Then, in terms of sell-out, we also believe it was quite small. We believe, as the introduction of new device, it was required to have consumers invest in the device. So therefore, even though sell-out wasn’t as fast as we expected, we still believe sell-out was quite OK.

Samsung certainly faced an uphill battle against the iPad with the Galaxy Tab, so it might have been better off not announcing any numbers that could have been mistaken for actual sales. Now the company risks losing much of the good will it’s built up over the past year with the success of its Galaxy S phones. The news also puts into question the 10 million Galaxy S phones Samsung said it sold last year.

It’s also unclear what the news means for Android’s tablet market share. Earlier today we reported that  Android tablets chipped away at the iPad’s market share in late 2010 — but if those numbers were based on Samsung’s inaccurate Galaxy Tab sales, then the iPad may not have lost much ground at all.

The news is a good sign for Microsoft’s fledgling mobile platform, but it’s clear that the company still has a long way to go before it can compete toe-to-toe with the more entrenched iPhone, or even Google’s Android platform. Consider, for example, that Apple managed to sell 3 million iPhone 4’s in one month.

In late December, Microsoft reported that it had shipped 1.5 million units. We still don’t know how many phones are actually in customers’ hands though. Shipment numbers tell us how many devices manufacturers deliver to stores, but many of those could still be sitting on shelves.

Customer satisfaction for Windows Phone 7 rose to 93 percent, and brand awareness jumped 22 points to 66 percent, since the phones were released in November, senior product manager Greg Sullivan said. “Sales are an important measure, but for a new platform we think customer satisfaction and active developer support are more important indicators of how sales will be over the long-term,” he said.

90 percent of WP7 owners said they would recommend it to others, Engadget reports. Microsoft also says it’s averaging 100 new apps in the WP7 Marketplace every day, with over 6,500 available now.

This, of course, should surprise no one. The iPad sparked the most recent tablet craze when it was announced early last year, this after the tablet market saw several false starts over the past few decades.

Moskowitz predicts tablet revenues will rise to $24.9 billion in 2011 (up from $10.2 billion this year) and that they’ll hit $34.1 billion in 2012. The iPad, which will make up for 89.4 percent of tablet revenues this year, will still account for a significant portion of total tablet revenues in the next few years. In 2011, he predicts the iPad will account for 71.6 percent of tablet revenue, and by 2012 it will still lead with 61.4 percent.

Apple said it shipped 7.5 million units in the iPad’s first six months, and some analysts predict it will sell up to 28 million units in 2011. The iPad has a significant head start on its rivals, and it also boasts more polished software — Android isn’t expected to be optimized for tablets until its version 3.0 release in the first half of 2011. Moskowitz also expects Android 3.0 to be released some time around the release of the second generation iPad, which should dull the impact of Android tablets even further.

Via All Things Digital

Unless Verizon lands Apple’s iPhone soon, it could potentially lose its leading carrier status to AT&T.

The sales data comes from a report by ITG Investment analyst Matthew Goodman and is based on point-of-sale data from thousands of wireless retailers across the country. It paints a horrendous decline for RIM’s BlackBerry — which went from over 90 percent of Verizon’s smartphones sales last year, to less than 20 percent last month. The reason, of course, was the rise in popularity of Android phones late last year. Android now accounts for over 80 percent of smartphone sales on the carrier.

But all is not rosy for Verizon. Horace Dediu from the industry analysis blog Asymco combined the ITG data with Apple’s most recent iPhone sales figures to show that Verizon is still losing out to the iPhone on AT&T (assuming ITG’s data is accurate). He concludes that the massive rise in iPhone sales following the release of the iPhone 4 (AT&T jumped from 2.7 million iPhones sold in the first quarter, to 5.7 million in the third) has stolen Verizon’s smartphone growth. In the same time period, Verizon went from 2.7 million smartphones sold (including Android, WebOS, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile) to 3.3 million.

That alone shows the power of the iPhone — Android, combined with other platforms, clearly isn’t enough for Verizon to keep up with AT&T in sales. Dediu also argues that Verizon is “growing its smartphone base slower than the overall market”, and that an over-reliance on Android may harm Verizon.

Verizon currently has over 92.1 million subscribers, compared to AT&T’s 90.1 million. Given the iPhone’s explosive growth compared to Android, Verizon’s dominance in the cellular arena is in danger of fading away if sales trends continue along the same lines.

The big conclusion? Verizon needs the iPhone, and it needs it soon.

Recent reports have all but confirmed that the iPhone is coming to Verizon in 2011, so it will be interesting to see how Verizon’s sales shift once it comes over. We can expect other platforms on Verizon to lose some ground, and AT&T to lose a significant number of new iPhone subscribers, once the iPhone hits Verizon.

Credit Suisse predicted in September that AT&T will lose 1.4 million users to Verizon if it gets the iPhone in 2011. Dediu takes things even further — he predicts that Verizon will land between 8 and 12 million new subscribers if it gets the iPhone.