That’s what research house Raymond James did in a recent survey of consumer smartphone purchasing intent. And the results are interesting — if only as a reflection of the platform partisanship that’s so rife within the smartphone space.

The details: As part of its survey,* Raymond James asked respondents what features would make them more likely to buy a new iPhone or an Android or BlackBerry device: Bigger screen? Lower price? Better functionality? But it also offered them the option of saying they would never use a particular device. And plenty of respondents availed themselves of it.

Of the consumers Raymond James surveyed, 20 percent said they would never buy an iPhone, 31 percent said they’d never buy an Android phone, and 71 percent said they’d never purchase a BlackBerry.

Not a particularly surprising breakdown, given the Google-Apple duopoly currently dominating the smartphone market. Android and iPhone captured more than 90 percent of the global smartphone market in the fourth quarter according to IDC. So the sentiments reflected in this survey shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone.

Still, it’s interesting to see purchasing sentiment gauged in terms of what smartphones consumers are adamantly opposed to using. If the smartphone market is truly so factionalized that some consumers say that nothing could convince them to switch away from their preferred device, then upstart platforms like Windows Phone and the like have a steep uphill climb, indeed.

* Survey was conducted between March 14 – March 26. It polled over 250 consumers, so big grain of salt.

We’ll see.

If Aereo is legal, what does that mean for the TV business?

We’ll see.

Who exactly is Aereo’s target market? Who’s going to pay them $8 a month to watch broadcast TV — but only broadcast TV — on the Web?

Ah. That we can start to answer.

Or, at least, we can see who Aereo thinks is using the service today.

Aereo has yet to talk about how many people are using the service, which is currently only available in the New York City area. But at our D: Dive into Media conference in February, CEO Chet Kanojia sketched out a rough sense of his customers.

Half of them, he said, are either cord-cutters or cord-nevers — people who used to have cable TV or have never signed up for it — and half are people who are still paying for cable.

And now, via a customer survey Aereo is sending out, we can deduce a bit more about Aereo’s sense of itself and its customers. Here’s a screenshot from the survey, which landed in my inbox today:

“Professional working parent” is a pretty broad group of people, I suppose. Same for “sports enthusiast” (though I think those people usually call themselves “fans”). But if you’re like me, you take one look at this list and you have a good sense of the ideal Aereo user — an edge case of some sort or another.

Which doesn’t mean Aereo thinks the business will be small — hence the $63 million it has raised so far. But until there’s a box there labeled “Just a normal person who watches TV like everyone else,” it’s hard to argue that this is aimed at a wide swath of America.

The culture-celebrating hijinks continue at Yahoo, it seems.

After free food and smartphones and even dressing up as a Yahoo purple banger, CEO Marissa Mayer now has a high-ranking exec dancing for employee enjoyment.

As part of an effort to improve participation in the annual Yahoo Employee Satisfaction Survey (YESS), Mayer instituted a punishment for the lowest participation rate of any division on her executive staff.

The culprit turned out to be Jackie Reses, EVP of people and development for Yahoo, which includes the unlikely combo of human resources and business development.

Thus, Reses apparently had to dance to the hit K-pop song “Gangnam Style” with her staff at the weekly FYI employee meeting at Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, Calif., HQ on Friday.

Despite having a rep as an intense New Yorker, said one employee, Reses has some “decent moves.” Others agreed.

Also decent was one of the top results of YESS, which showed that employee belief in the future vision of the company was up 32 points year over year.

That’s not a big surprise, given the upward trajectory of Yahoo’s shares of late. But, more to the point, it has a weak comparable in last year’s survey, which painted a picture of a deeply demoralized workplace. That’s because the 2011 YESS questions went out to employees the week that the company fired CEO Carol Bartz, with most of the responses gathered in the ensuing weeks.

Despite the improvement, this year’s YESS also still showed a lot of worry about whether Yahoo leadership can execute, and whether the company can achieve strong results over the long term.

[UPDATE: One reader said the Yahoo survey is now called YEES, the Yahoo Employee Engagement Survey. I could not determine if that name change had been made.]

That’s the question that at least one Wall Street firm was asking, in a downgrade of Yahoo stock today. In dropping Yahoo’s rank to “market-perform,” Sanford C. Bernstein analysts noted worries about its turnaround efficacy, a possibly jarring reorg of its advertising unit, and also whether the future sale of its assets in China’s Alibaba Group can save the day again, as it did for last quarter’s results.

“We think there may be upside from an eventual Alibaba IPO at a valuation much higher than $50B or a Yahoo! core turn-around, but it is hard to have high conviction in either given the facts we currently have,” said the report, in part. “In addition, there is manageable but real downside risk: reorganization (e.g., of the sales force) could be negative for revenues, management could decide to invest in growth now and cut excess later, and MSFT RPS guarantee could expire without a renewal.”

Those are all good questions for investors to ask, of course, although more have been caught up in the hype/hope ahead of actual performance gains.

Still, it’s no sweat to get caught up in digital execs being made to trip the light fantastic for their weak results. So, since I was not there to enjoy Reses’ performance, click here for an also fun-tastic JibJab Gangnam video I made of her.

According to yet another online shopping survey for the holiday shopping season, this one from comScore, people are buying a lot more online than last year.

I know this people-buying-stuff-online thing must come as a shock to those who have been living in a cave for several years now.

For those with an Internet connection, though, sales rose to $1.04 billion on Black Friday, an increase of 26 percent over last year. It is the first time that Web purchasing for the important retailing day was over $1 billion, with 57.3 million consumers visiting online stores.

The entire amount of 2012 online holiday spending from the beginning of November until now, according to comScore, has been $13.7 billion. It is a 16 percent rise, but still a drop in the bucket compared to bricks-and-mortar retailing.

But, according to a statement from a comScore guy, “We continue to see this shopping day become more and more prominent in the e-commerce channel — particularly among those who prefer to avoid crowds at the stores.”

People don’t like being jostled at a mall when they can sit at home and buy more things on a couch. Imagine that!

Amazon was where the most action was among online retailing, followed by Walmart, Best Buy, Target and Apple. Auction site eBay was excluded from this group.

And, if you can bear any more stats, here is a chart from ChannelAdvisor on online sales:

In what has become an annual holiday tradition, those who keep track of these things have started in on touting just how digital the holiday shopper has become, whipping out all manner of buzzwords to do so.

Last year, it was Cyber Monday — this year, it’s turned out to be Mobile Thursday. What’s next? Social Network Saturday? Self-Driving Car Sunday? (We still have Black Friday, by the way, which is today.)

And, indeed, the Mobile Thursday phrase got some big laps around the track, with numerous online shopping surveys — coming out faster than you can buy that new tablet — using it in their flash reports yesterday and today.

This year’s anecdotal meme: Apple iPads go well with pumpkin pie.

What isn’t said so much is that it is still a very small number — though fast-growing — over the last few years, with overall sales reaching $500 million for Thursday, compared to about $1.2 billion on Monday, according to comScore.

Still, for now, no one seems to break out actual mobile sales figures, which are clearly still a fraction of the totals. But they are more than happy to tell you that people are certainly browsing on their mobile devices, which should come as a surprise to exactly no one who is tired of talking to the relatives about three hours into the day.

According to IBM’s Benchmark report, for example, online sales were up 17.4 percent over 2011 on Thanksgiving Day, noting that “big winners were retailers who connected customers with personalized deals across multiple screens including PCs, smartphones and tablets.”

Some stats from IBM about Thursday:

Mobile Traffic: The number of consumers using a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site reached 25.3 percent, up from 66.2 percent over 2011.

Mobile Shopping: The number of consumers using their mobile device to make a purchase increased to 18.3 percent, up 65.3 percent from 2011.

Mobile Email: Smartphone and tablet shoppers responded to email deals from retailers, with emails opened on mobile devices jumping 23 percent on Thanksgiving Day over 2011.

Couch Commerce: In the evening hours, consumers shifted from shopping through their smartphones at the dinner table to buying through their iPad on the couch. At the end of the day the iPad drove more retail traffic than any other device with traffic reaching 10.7 percent versus the iPhone at 9.1 percent and Android at 5.8 percent.

Social Shopping: Shoppers referred from Social Networks such as Facebook and Twitter increased in evening hours generating .63 percent of all online sales on Thanksgiving.

And today, Black Friday, IBM slightly upped those figures, noting that the iPhone was the preferred device to bring into a store to shop with — presumably irritating sales clerks everywhere.

Over at Fab, CEO Jason Goldberg was touting in a Betashop blog post that his mobile app sales were 40 percent of the retail site’s total for the day. It’s usually 33 percent, so it’s a small jump, which Goldberg attributed to a tweet by Apple promoting it. But how much did he sell? He’s not saying.

And eBay said it launched 20 mobile-only e-commerce promotions over its app, as did many other retailers.

Also, no surprise, the New York Times weighed in with the classic trend piece: “The Shrewd Shopper Carries a Smartphone.” Um, everyone carries a smartphone now, but it apparently gets more magical when you take it to Macy’s.

We’ll see if Mobile Thursday becomes Mobile Holiday Season, which would be a big deal — but it’s winning so far in the pundit stakes.

Until we get actual numbers, here’s a chart about the whole thing from eBay:

Twitter is rolling out the tool today, which it will provide for free to some of its biggest advertisers and will eventually offer more widely.

It’s a straightforward idea: Some users will see a tweet asking them to take a survey, and if they click on it, the message will expand within their timeline, and trigger a brief series of questions.

Nielsen will work with Twitter to audit/analyze the results. Twitter hopes that it will be able to use the feature to convince advertisers that they’re getting their money’s worth, and to help them tweak and optimize their campaigns.

For the rest of us, the tool is a good reminder of why Twitter is intent on controlling the way Tweets are displayed, and maintaining  a “consistent user experience” throughout the service — even if it upsets some partners and developers.

That’s because the surveys are essentially small multimedia presentations, and Twitter can only deliver them through its own platforms. This will work on Twitter’s Web site, mobile sites, mobile apps, etc. But it wouldn’t work on, say, Flipboard.

And, while short, text-based surveys aren’t the most amazing things in the world, you can see how Twitter could use that same technology to present much more interesting experiences. Note, for instance, that the company has already shown its interest in e-commerce a few times, most recently via an American Express campaign.

Twitter started out constrained by a 140-character text limit. But it’s clearly set on augmenting those messages with lots of other bells and whistles.

According to a new survey out today by PwC Consulting, prepared in cooperation with the trade magazines CIO and CSO, the general mood among security executives around the world is optimistic. When asked about their security posture in the survey, nearly 70 percent said that they were “very confident” or “somewhat confident” that they have sufficient security policies and practices in place, and more than 70 percent said their policies are “effective.”

All this confidence rings a bit like Chip Diller from “Animal House” imploring the crowd at a parade to “remain calm, all is well,” while chaos erupted around them. The number of organizations who admitted they had suffered more than 50 security incidents in the prior year increased to 13 percent. That’s a slight increase from last year, but a lot higher than in previous years.

Perhaps their confidence stems from this: Only 7 percent of respondents said they had experienced a loss in shareholder value, and 14 percent saw a financial loss stemming from a security incident in the prior year. The financial loss number is down from 20 percent in the two prior years. But there’s a catch, PwC says: Most companies haven’t done the thorough analysis to determine whether they’re likely to experience a loss in value in the first place: Most haven’t considered whether or not a high-profile security breach might damage a brand.

And even though attacks are on the rise, fewer than half of those executives surveyed expected a boost in their security budgets for the coming year. Most of those — 86 percent — pointed to their bosses as the biggest obstacle to improving security.

The survey — its formal name is “The Global State of Information Security Survey 2013″ — sought input from 9,300 CEOs, CFOs, CISOs, CIOs, CSOs, vice presidents and directors of IT and information security in 128 countries.

Update: Today, it seems, is a day for security surveys. IBM’s X-Force security unit has just released its 2012 Mid-Year Trend and Risk Report, and the picture it paints would deflate a lot of that confidence found in the PwC report. The group monitors some 15 billion security events every day for its 4,000-odd clients in 130 countries.

What IBM sees is an increase in efforts to target individuals by directing them to a trusted Web address or site which has been injected with malicious code, and then use weaknesses in browser software to install malware on the target system. Lots of big-name Web sites are still vulnerable, IBM says.

Also, attacks using SQL injection — a technique in which attackers access a database via the Web site it is connected to — are on the rise. Big Blue has also noticed an uptick in attacks on mobile devices. Most people with smartphones are still vulnerable to attacks carried out via text message.

Maybe those overconfident-seeming execs should read this IBM report.

Roughly a quarter of those queried said it would be easier to shut off their water for a day than to shut off their iPad. Nearly as many — 22 percent — said they would go without electricity for a day. Of course, logically, that would mean that they wouldn’t have an iPad to use the next day, but apparently many of those surveyed weren’t thinking that far ahead.

Also disturbing was the fact that nearly half of the thousand or so iPad owners polled by Brainshark said they would forego brushing their teeth on a business trip rather than go without their iPad. I’m sure their co-workers would love that.

So, how painful would a broken iPad be?

Some 40 percent said it would rate ahead of a minor car accident, with almost a third saying it was above a root canal on the pain scale. A full 16 percent would sooner have their nose broken, and one in 10 would rather be fired.

Part of the reason people love their iPads is that owners are using them everywhere. And, sadly, we do mean everywhere. About 60 percent of people use theirs on the toilet, while more than one in three have used theirs naked. More than one in five have used their iPad in the tub. No word on how many iPads have gone for a swim in said tubs.

According to Fenwick & West’s latest Silicon Valley Venture Capital Survey, fundings in the second quarter of this year showed the highest valuation increases in more than five years.

Looking at 115 financings of tech and life sciences companies, in Q2 the well-known tech-focused law firm saw “up” rounds accounting for 74 percent, while “down” ones were 11 percent. Flat rounds were 15 percent.

That was a marked change from the previous quarter, which was 65 percent up, 22 percent down and 13 percent flat.

More importantly, it was the 12th consecutive quarter in which ups were ahead of downs.

Perhaps even more importantly, average funding prices for the quarter rose 99 percent, which is nearly double the 52 percent increase in Q1. Two big-ticket financings upped the Q2 number, which would have been 70 percent if they were removed.

Still, it is the highest amount increase since Fenwick began compiling the numbers in 2004.

Internet/digital media and software was the biggest beneficiary of the rise. Hardware was next, but life sciences and cleantech did not keep pace.

Fenwick said that VC fundraising is still lower than 2007 levels, noting that “venture capital continues to be a tale of two cities, where the Internet/digital media and software industries dominate other industries, and venture capitalists with proven track records can raise large funds but fundraising for others is much more problematic.”

The report, co-authored by Fenwick partners Barry J. Kramer and Michael J. Patrick, noted that Series B rounds were strong in the quarter, although the percentage of them has declined for three straight quarters, “perhaps indicating that companies are having difficulty securing Series B funding, but those that do are being rewarded with substantial valuation increases.”

Here’s the report for your personal perusal:

Q212_VC_Terms_Survey_Report _Spacing_

The survey, which tracked 641 small-and medium-sized businesses during three time periods over the past year, found that the industry is performing better based on at least a couple of key metrics. In particular, it noted two areas of improvement: consumers are more willing to spend beyond the deal’s value and the amount spent by repeat customers on their next visit has increased.

The report was conducted by Utpal Dholakia, a professor of management at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business.

Most notably, his findings are in contrast with a study he conducted in June, which revealed a number of red flags, including a relatively low numbers of buyers who were spending beyond the deal value.

But in the report published last week, it was his goal to find out whether the industry’s performance was deteriorating as questions arose on the long-term viability of the business model. Dholakia explained the survey’s results in a video, saying: “We were concerned because of negative publicity that many of these daily deals sites have received that performance might be deteriorating.”

Indeed, over the past couple of years, there have been a number of recurring issues brought up in the media, ranging from deal fatigue (the phenomenon in which consumers become less enthusiastic about purchasing offers) to stories about merchants becoming overrun with deal-seekers to the point of exhaustion. Additionally, Groupon’s public offering was fraught with a number of problems, and the company continues to trade at more than half off. Today, its stock fell 5.5 percent, or 48 cents, to trade at $8.31 a share.

Despite all that, the professor added this surprisingly positive message: “On most measures, performance has remained the same or has improved.”

Both Groupon and LivingSocial have spent the past year or so fine-tuning the experience and working more closely with merchants to ensure that each deal is a success. Looks like the extra effort is starting to pay off.

Here’s some of the findings from the report, along with Dholakia’s video:

• Almost 80 percent of daily deal patrons are new customers, even for businesses running their seventh (or more) daily deal. Businesses continue to see equally stable conversion rates for both repeat purchasing and spending beyond deal value.
• The most profitable daily deal sectors in order: Photographers; health and fitness services;  tourism-related services; and doctors and dentists.
• The least profitable deals: Cleaning services; restaurants and bars; and retailers.
• The percentage of businesses making money remained fairly stable in Spring 2011 (55.5 percent) and October 2011 (54.9 percent), but jumped by 6 points in the May 2012 to 61.5 percent.
• Smaller businesses were able to retain customers better: Businesses with annual revenue below $500,000 enjoyed a 41 percent retention rate compared with larger businesses, which had a 15 percent retention rate.
• Daily deal site loyalty levels are low for businesses running multiple daily deals. For a business’ second deal, 54 percent used the same daily deal site they used the first time. By the time they have run seven or more deals, only 8.6 percent of businesses have used the same site for all their daily deals, whereas 27.5 percent have used four or more daily deal sites.

A new survey of potential tablet buyers by ChangeWave Research shows collapsing interest in Amazon’s tablet. Conducted in May with a sample of 2,893 North American consumers, it shows just 8 percent of respondents interested in purchasing the Fire in the next 90 days. That’s a big change from last November, when the device first launched. Then, 22 percent of survey respondents indicated that they planned to buy the Fire. So, in six months, interest in Amazon’s $199 tablet has slipped by nearly two-thirds.

That’s a sizable drop. What’s behind it?

ChangeWave speculates that it’s related to a decline in customer satisfaction. Since the research firm’s last survey, the percentage of customers reporting high satisfaction with the Fire has slipped 15 points. In this latest survey, just 41 percent of Fire owners said they were “very satisfied” with the device. Meanwhile, 81 percent of iPad owners said the same thing about their tablet. Little wonder that 73 percent of consumers planning to buy a tablet say they’ll opt for an iPad.

But, as we’ve noted before, there are likely other reasons for slumping Kindle Fire demand, as well.

• It could be dropping off as customers postpone their purchases in anticipation of a new version of the device.
• Or it could be declining because the Fire was a really well-executed holiday play whose novelty has since worn off.
• Or it could be that the iPad 2, which Apple continues to sell alongside the new iPad at a lower price, is winning over some of the same consumers that Amazon has been targeting with the Fire.

More people are paying to play social games than they were a year ago, but the average player is also spending less than in the past.

According to SuperData, the average social gamer who pays to play in the U.S. spent $37.59 in April, which is about $8 less than a year ago, when the average social gamer spent $45.58.

SuperData partners with publishers and developers to create an online gaming panel, which tracks more than a million paying online gamers every month. The report covers the U.S., Germany, Brazil and Spain, spanning all major social game genres, including city building, farming, and strategy and combat.

While the amount each player pays has fallen, SuperData found that as the industry has matured, more people have become more comfortable spending money inside the free-to-play games. In April, 2.5 percent of social gamers converted to spending users, compared to 1.4 percent a year earlier.

But the average paying game player should not be confused with the overall average spend per user. After all, you can spend a lot of time harvesting crops and building cities without ever paying a dime.

For instance, in the first quarter, Zynga said the average bookings per user totaled 5.5 cents, which is the company’s total revenue for one quarter spread across all gamers — whether they pay or not.

SuperData found that game players who play mid-core games, which include strategy and combat games, are spending the most right now. Meanwhile, the average spending player of farming games has been on a decline for the past few months.

The research firm estimates that the North American social gaming market will be worth $1.8 billion by the end of this year, and the worldwide social gaming market, including social games on mobile, is expected to hit $13 billion in 2015.

One of the least-changed parts of AllThingsD since we started this site has been our “Voices” section, which has attracted robust and ever-increasing traffic over the years.

But today Voices gets a new look as we relaunch an updated section to bring you even more writing and information from outside sources. Voices will be run by senior editor Beth Callaghan, and will offer six regular features:

Must-Reads — formerly called Voices — will be the same daily compendium of links from around the Web. These are pieces we’ve selected editorially because we think they’re worth your time. We’ve made two changes in order to clarify the nature of the content and our role in suggesting them: We’ve renamed the links “Must-Reads From Other Web Sites” and we’ve simplified them to consist merely of outbound links. The links will appear in widgets across the site and in an archive — but when you click on a headline, you’ll be taken directly to the original Web site.

Voices is now made up of exclusive op-eds and posts from outside contributors who are well-versed in AllThingsD and have unique perspectives to share. We welcome and will evaluate all such pieces, and also plan to reach out to a range of industry experts on a variety of topics. Our goal is to spur debate and also give smart and engaging content a platform on our site.

Forum is conceived as an assembly of quick opinions from four or five well-known personalities on a single issue that is in the news. Topics can range from thoughts on the possible bubble in Silicon Valley to what’s the most interesting new trend to how possible privacy regulation will impact the tech industry. We hope to elicit a lot of different opinions and insights from a wide-ranging panel of execs, academics, venture capitalists, Wall Street analysts, entrepreneurs, bloggers and more.

Eye to Eye will be even more pointed, pitting a pair of often-opposing viewpoints on a controversial topic of the week — kind of like a Spy vs. Spy, but with words. The possibilities are endless here: Was $1 billion too much for Facebook to pay for photo-sharing site Instagram? Will Yahoo’s recent restructuring work? Do you think Google Glasses is a good idea? Where will Apple’s stock be in a year?

Numbers is a weekly story told by data — sometimes scientific, sometimes irreverent, always interesting. We will be working with many top research outfits, and will also be doing a number of our own polls of readers. We love infographics, surveys and pie charts at ATD and you’re going to get a whole lot of them.

Lastly, Ten Things About Me finds answers to entertaining and informative questions aimed at prominent people in the digital realm. It’s a little like the Proust Questionnaire mixed with the kind of queries that we are well known for at our D conferences, plus a whole lot of unusual ones, so you can get to know a variety of tech and media figures in a different way. First up: Twitter and Square inventor Jack Dorsey tells us what he’d be up to if he weren’t doing what he is doing now.

The new Voices will roll out all this week. Enjoy.

Well, today we heard from another bank, and its opinions about Intel’s Romley chip and what it means for data center spending couldn’t be more different. Chris Whitmore, an analyst with Deutsche Bank Market Research, published a note to clients today, arguing that Romley will indeed spur a new round of spending in corporate data centers, and that it will have an equally strong secondary effect on the fortunes of enterprise storage companies, specifically EMC and NetApp.

One of the things that Romley will encourage, Whitmore writes, is a growth in the density of virtual machines running in each server. (Remember that, more often than not, a physical server is virtualized or subdivided into many virtual servers, allowing each machine to act like several machines.) More virtual machines allows you to consolidate your physical machines and add more in the same footprint if you want, which in turn means more computing work getting done overall. Whitmore estimates that, in general, data centers will boost their workloads by 20 to 25 percent by the end of next year.

Roughly 26 percent of Romley chip purchases will be used in these virtualized environments, Whitmore estimates. And that tends to spur demand for storage to support the virtual machines. In fact, the growth of terabytes worth of storage products shipped mirrors closely the unit growth of servers. (See the graphic, below, which I screen-grabbed from the report; click to see it bigger.) In short, it’s good news for NetApp and EMC. Whitmore says both are taking share from other vendors, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell, with sales growing at north of 20 percent a year — a growth rate that’s higher than that of the overall market, which grew 14 percent last year. He rates shares of both EMC and NetApp a “buy,” with price targets of $35 and $60, respectively.

Great news for EMC and NetApp, but what does it mean for Intel? Whitmore says to expect a mixed bag. Companies wanting to boost their use of virtual machines will be buyers. Companies that aren’t into virtualization so much, maybe not. “We believe our estimate of x86 servers shipped into virtual environments growing from 21 percent in 2011 to 26 percent in 2013 could prove conservative,” Whitmore writes. “As a result, although we expect Romley to have a relatively muted impact on overall server unit demand, we do expect it to drive another leg of virtual machine growth.”

It comes in the form of a survey of 100 CIOs by the investment bank J.P. Morgan. The firm finds that, on average, CIOs say they’re going to boost their IT spending by 2.7 percent this year, up from 2.4 percent in 2011. That may not seem like a big change, but here’s why its important: It’s the first time in a few years that the same survey has detected a directional change in sentiment. CIOs are at long last saying they intend to boost their spending on IT, rather than trimming it back and back and back as they have for the last several years. “In our prior CIO survey in September 2011, the directional movement indicated a reduction in planned spending growth, as at that time CIOs were starting to pare back on spending during more uncertain macroeconomic conditions,” the firm says in its report, which was shared exclusively with AllThingsD.

The optimism is a bit more pronounced when you see it expressed in the graphic below, which I grabbed from raw survey results. More than two-thirds of the CIOs surveyed said they planned to boost their overall IT spend this year, most of them by a modest 1-5 percent, but some by more than 10 percent. Last year, the figure was 58 percent, but it usually swings up by only 3 or 4 percentage points, analyst Mark Moskowitz told me.

“The overall tone we got in our conversations with these CIOs was more optimistic than it has been in a while,” Moskowitz said. “They have the green light to start projects that are going to take several quarters to get done. Most aren’t willing to do that when they’re worried their overall business is going to roll over.” A lot of that has to do with more confidence in the overall macroeconomic environment.

And where will that growth be? And, perhaps more importantly, where won’t it be? Software, storage and security are looking like big spending priorities among the CIOs surveyed. Business intelligence tools and getting mobile devices integrated are also high on the list — there’s that ongoing trend toward “bring your own device” (BYOD), rearing its persistent head once again.

Employee-purchased iPhones, iPads and Android devices are supplanting company-assigned BlackBerrys. “BYOD is real,” Moskowitz says. “And you have to assume that Apple is going to be the one that benefits the most from it.”

Other winners include EMC and NetApp, as they play strongly in networked storage. Server virtualization — making one physical server act like dozens of servers, using software to subdivide its resources — also has a lot of room to grow, the survey finds. That’s good news for VMware.

Losers? There are few. Intel’s new Romley chip isn’t going to be as big a deal in spurring spending on new servers: In fact,91 percent of CIOs surveyed said they don’t expect Intel’s new chip to drive new spending in the data center. Intel’s last big upgrade, Nehalem, did change the game, Moskowitz says. The trouble is, most of the companies using Nehalem-generation chips in their servers are happy with them, and are unlikely to bother with the expense of an upgrade, for now.

Nor is Windows 8 going to cause a new round of PC buying, as both Hewlett-Packard and Dell are hoping. “A new version of Windows hasn’t caused a PC upgrade cycle since 1995,” Moskowitz told me. Asked directly if Windows 8 was expected to drive a major PC upgrade cycle, 78 percent of the CIOs in the survey said no. In fact, at least 30 of the CIOs in the survey said they were still working on deploying Windows 7. Ouch. Perhaps it’s too much to ask for things to be looking up for everyone all at once.

(Image is a movie poster for the 1935 British film starring Cicely Courtneidge, but the title song in this case is, well, awful. What I really wanted was an image of Fred Astaire dancing with Joan Fontaine to the underappreciated George and Ira Gershwin tune of the same name, from the 1937 film “A Damsel in Distress,” but I could find nothing suitable. So — loving Gershwin tunes as I do — just for fun, I’ve embedded both Astaire and Billie Holiday singing the tune, below, courtesy of Grooveshark. Yes, I’ll admit, sometimes I have a little too much fun in this job.)

That said, it is helpful to see that demand quantified, which is exactly what Baird Equity Research has done in its latest iPad survey. Among a group of 488 tech-savvy consumers between the ages of 18 and 34, Baird found that 24 percent of U.S. respondents planned to purchase the new iPad in the next three months. Among international respondents, that number rose to 29 percent. Interestingly, 42 percent of respondents (both U.S. and international) said the purchase would be their first tablet, while the remaining 48 percent said they already owned the iPad 2 or its predecessor.

A few more notable findings:

• 15 percent of U.S respondents and 22 percent of international ones said that they plan to purchase an iPad 2 at its newly discounted price.
• A quarter of the 59 Kindle Fire owners in the survey said they plan to purchase an iPad in the next three months. Says Baird, “We would note that the Kindle Fire was released in mid-November, marking a fairly quick turn-around.”
• Respondents who planned to purchase the 4G iPad favored Verizon and AT&T equally.
• The 16 gigabyte iPad was by far the most popular model among consumers Baird surveyed.

It turns out that people responding to our poll about whether they were buying an iPad 3 — which Apple is unveiling this coming week — are overwhelmingly planning to fork over the dough for a new one.

Nearly 70 percent of those who answered said they would be buying the latest iteration of the popular tablet device, while 17 percent said they were sticking with their old one.

Only 11 percent used a competing tablet — powered by Google Android or Amazon Kindle.

And about 4.5 percent of respondents said that they had not decided, but were looking forward to the last “Twilight” movie, now that Bella finally has her fangs as a newborn vampire with a newborn baby, too.

Thus, many want a bite of the latest Apple, but are definitely not Twihards.

Here’s the poll again, if you want to add your vote:

View This Poll

The share of U.S. adults who own tablet computers nearly doubled from 10 percent to 19 percent between mid-December and early January, while the same growth spike also applied to e-book readers, which also jumped from 10 percent to 19 percent over the same period. The driving force behind the surge in ownership, Pew said, was the relatively low cost of tablets like the $199 Kindle Fire and the $249 Barnes & Noble Nook tablet, as well as the price of some e-readers dropping below $100.

The new data comes after a period — from mid-2011 into the fall — in which there wasn’t a lot of change in the ownership of tablets and e-book readers, Pew said.

We already had an inkling that the Amazon Kindle Fire sold very well in its first few weeks on the market; a Barclays analyst has estimated that Amazon sold 5.5 million Kindle Fire tablets last quarter, and predicts that Amazon will sell 18.4 million Kindle Fires this year, giving Amazon half of the non-iPad tablet market.

Also not entirely surprising: Households with higher incomes bought more tablets, while women’s ownership of e-readers increased more than men’s. More than a third of those living in households earning more than $75,000 — 36 percent — now own a tablet computer, Pew said. Ownership of e-readers among women grew more than among men, from 11 percent to 21 percent; compared to a 5 percent increase for men, with just 16 percent of them owning e-readers.

Anecdotally, those cheaper tablets still are harder to spot “out in the wild” than the iPad, as my AllThingsD colleague, Peter Kafka, notes here, whereas iPads seem to be popping up everywhere, from the airport to the gym. Personally, I know a handful of female adults who got either Kindle Fire tablets or less expensive Kindle e-readers this holiday season.

The Pew report comes from the combined results of two surveys — one conducted Jan. 5-8 among 1,000 adults age 18 and older; and another, conducted Jan. 12-15 of 1,008 adults, with a margin of error of +/- 2.4 percentage points. The study is part of Pew’s research, supported by funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to look at how tablets and e-readers are impacting libraries.

(Photo courtesy of DJ Murdok/Flickr)

The stock fell $1.36, or roughly 6.6 percent, to $19.27 a share.

In November, the company’s stock priced at $20 a share and has been fairly consistent since, except for one major hiccup late last month when shares dropped as low as $15.

But it’s almost as if investors were looking for a reason to dump the stock — the survey released today by Susquehanna Financial Group and daily deal industry tracking firm Yipit was largely positive. It found that 80 percent of merchants said they enjoyed working with daily deals sites, such as Groupon, LivingSocial and others.

Some of the more negative points included concerns about the high level of discounts associated with featuring a daily deal and low repeat rates from consumers who purchased vouchers.

The response the market may have found the most alarming was how often merchants were comfortable running deals. The survey found that 52 percent of the merchants had no plans to feature deals in the next six months, and only 24 percent intend to offer one in the same time period.

But realistically, most small-to-medium-size merchants could not offer deals more often than once a year, given that it typically takes that long for vouchers to expire. Most customers redeem the coupons over several months.

The survey polled nearly 400 merchants that had run daily deals in the past with companies such as Groupon and LivingSocial, but only 100 responded to the questions.

It’s not clear if Netflix’s recent series of snafus are Amazon’s gain or not. But in a just-released report by ForeSee, one went up and one went down.

It’s an easy guess which was which.

In the well-known customer satisfaction survey of the Top 40 online retailers during the holiday season — which ForeSee has been conducting twice a year for the last seven years — Amazon rose to its highest spot ever, while Netflix’s score dropped significantly.

Amazon got an 88 out of 100, up two points, while Netflix dropped seven points to 79. The survey noted that “Netflix saw scores drop in every single element of the website that ForeSee measures, including site content, site functionality, merchandise, and prices.”

Ooops.

(Netflix fared better with customers in another poll last week, conducted by Citigroup. As Peter Kafka noted: “They’re less happy than they used to be. But they don’t seem to be going anywhere.”)

But in the ForeSee survey, Netflix moved from being a consumer darling to just another face in the crowd. It garnered the average score, which is also 79, a number that has risen from 74 since 2005.

But Netflix was not the only online retailer hit. Also down: Gap.com (down 6 percent to 73), and Overstock.com (down 5 percent to 72).

But on the up: TigerDirect.com (up 8 percent to 79) and J.C. Penney (up 6 percent to 83).

In general, ForeSee concluded that consumers are starting to get the hang of this e-commerce thing, and have become less price-sensitive, too.

And here’s a pretty chart explaining it all (click on the image to make it larger):

In a post last week about what could be in a Facebook smartphone — one in a series about the mobile efforts at the social networking giant — AllThingsD.com asked readers if they wanted one or not (we also offered a “maybe” option, as you can see below).

And, after almost 1,500 responses so far, it seems most people had no interest in such a device from Facebook, with almost 81 percent giving it the nix.

Slightly less than 8 percent wanted one, with 12 percent saying that they would possibly consider it.

Apparently, Google Android and Apple iPhone have little to be worried about, for now.

View This Poll

Related Posts on the Facebook Phone:

1. It’s Finally Real and Its Name Is Buffy
2. Forking Android Offers Both Promise and Pitfalls
3. The “Slayer” That Wasn’t
4. If It Comes, Will It Already Be Too Late?
5. The Facebook Phone: Why Would You Want One?

Full Facebook Phone Coverage »

A new survey conducted by ChangeWave and RBC Capital Markets found that five percent of 2,600 respondents had either already preordered or were “very likely” to buy the Fire, exceeding the four percent who said in 2010 that they were very likely to buy the iPad. Another 12 percent said they were “somewhat likely” to purchase the Fire, again surpassing the nine percent who said the same thing of the original iPad prior to its launch.

And of the five percent of “very likely” buyers, 26 percent said they would delay their iPad purchase to buy the Fire.

If those metrics are surprising, they really shouldn’t be. The Fire’s low price, relative to the iPad, is obviously a major attraction — $199 to the iPad’s $499. And — thanks to the iPad — consumers are now familiar enough with the tablet category to be comfortable dropping $199 on the Fire.

That said, the pent-up Kindle Fire demand on display in this survey suggests that Apple may finally have a true tablet rival with which to battle, as RBC analyst Mike Abramsky observes:

“Tablet contenders (Xoom, Galaxy Tab, PlayBook, etc.) have failed to gain appreciable traction against iPad’s estimated 67 percent share, and iPad 2 should be a popular holiday purchase,” he writes. “However, strong early Fire uptake seems likely, raising speculation Apple now faces a real tablet contender.”

Yahoo — which has been trying to right itself after a series of missteps and an ever-weakening business — took another direct hit yesterday, as it got dinged in a high-profile annual survey of the Top 100 global brands.

According to Interbrand’s “Best Global Brands 2011,” Yahoo dropped 11 percent in brand value — calculated as $4.4 billion — in the year in which it fell from No. 66 to No. 76.

Way to go, Yahoo marketing! I think that pricey “It’s You” advertising campaign might not have worked.

Meanwhile, Apple broke into the Top 10 list for the first time, vaulting from No. 17 to No. 8, rising 58 percent in brand value to $33.5 billion.

Other tech companies did pretty well in the Interbrand poll — which is the gold standard of the state of brand health with consumers — especially compared to Yahoo (whose brand value high was in 2007 and which is now back at 2001 levels).

For example: IBM kept its No. 2 spot, with brand value rising eight percent; Microsoft fell three percent, but maintained its No. 3 place; Google stayed at No. 4, up 27 percent; and Amazon rose 32 percent and reached No. 26 from No. 36.

Even troubled companies prevailed over Yahoo’s twin declines: Hewlett-Packard held on to its No. 10 slot, with brand value up six percent; Research In Motion dropped only five percent and two slots, from No. 54 to No. 56; and Nokia fell from No. 8 to No. 14 and saw its brand value decline 15 percent.

Most interesting, perhaps, about the 12-year-old survey: Six of the Top 10 brands are tech companies.