Demand Media beat Wall Street expectations in the third quarter, posting a loss of five cents a share. Investors had expected it to lose from four to six cents.

Revenue was up 25 percent to $85.1 million, compared to $65.4 million in the same period a year ago. Minus traffic acquisition costs, sales increased 26 percent to $78.1 million from $62.2 million.

The stock of the Santa Monica, Calif., social content company has suffered in the quarter due to worries about its traffic and growth, but it has recently bounced back after hitting all-time lows.

After losing almost nine percent today, in profit-taking ahead of earnings after a recent price surge, Demand shares rose over 17 percent in after-hours trading to $8.30.

Some more details, according to a Demand statement on the Q3 financial results:

Content & Media Revenue increased 27% to $50.7 million, compared with $39.8 million in Q310.

Traffic acquisition costs (TAC), which represent the portion of Content & Media revenue shared with Demand Media partners, of $3.4 million, or 6.7% of Content & Media revenue, compared with $3.2 million, or 7.9% of Content & Media revenue, in Q310.

Content & Media Revenue ex-TAC grew 29% to $47.4 million, from $36.7 million in Q310.

Registrar Revenue increased 20% to $30.7 million compared with $25.5 million in Q310.

In addition to its more high-profile content business, Demand also has a domain registry unit.

“We reported another strong quarter as we continue to build Demand Media’s foundation for long-term growth,” said Richard Rosenblatt, Chairman and CEO of Demand Media in the statement. “The Company is uniquely positioned to deliver data-driven professional content through its robust content publishing platform. We are now in the process of optimizing that platform while increasing our investment in video content and enhancing the quality, engagement and user experience of our sites.”

There will be a conference call at 2 pm PT today, which I will liveblog (as long as it is lively!).

Until then, enjoy the official Q3 earnings press release:

3Q11 Earnings ReleaseFINAL

Just last week, it seemed as if the dangerous riptide had finally turned for Demand Media, the social content company whose stock for the quarter bottomed out in mid-October, in the $5-a-share range.

It has now rebounded to close Friday at $7.76, with a market valuation of just over $651 million — still a far cry from a high of over $27 a share in the last year, but well below the target price of upward of $14 from Wall Street analysts.

That’s why there will be plenty of questions for CEO Richard Rosenblatt in a conference call scheduled for after the Santa Monica, Calif.-based Demand reports its third-quarter earnings, following the close of markets this afternoon.

Analysts are expecting Demand to lose four to six cents a share. Revenue is expected to be up.

One issue sure to be on the docket will be the traffic problems at its flagship eHow site, which stymied Demand in the quarter. The situation caused it to release a statement about the issue, “which the Company believes is temporary and was the result of an internal technical issue. The technical issue has recently been remediated.”

Assume you will hear more on that and other topics, including updates on the cost of its content and the continued impact on Demand of search-algorithm changes at Google, as well as how it is faring in attracting more lucrative advertising.

I will be covering the earnings and the analyst call, so tune in later today for answers.

In the end — the bitter end, that is — there really is no good time to fire someone.

But the timing of the ouster of Carol Bartz as CEO of Yahoo is one of the more curious things about the corporate mishegas at the Silicon Valley Internet giant of late.

That included drastically moving up the clock on Bartz, which was not part of a plan until recently. In fact, several sources were told only last month by Yahoo board members that evaluation of her status — her contract ended at the beginning of 2013 — would not take place until the end of 2011.

That obviously changed.

And, because it is Yahoo — which never met a crisis situation it could not hopelessly complexify — there are numerous and conflicting accounts about the reasons it was done so quickly and abruptly.

They include the board’s feeling that Bartz had not responded to their requests for a credible strategic plan; worries that she would not ever meet annual performance goals, including improving its stock price; upcoming weak third-quarter numbers, which will continue a troublesome downward trend in Yahoo’s key advertising business; and, perhaps most intriguingly, the need to make a move before it was revealed that another activist investor, this time Third Point’s Daniel Loeb, had decided to target Bartz and the Yahoo board.

One thing is certain: The firing of Bartz was messier than it needed to be, mostly because several sources said she was caught unawares.

“She did not know it was happening, even if she probably should have seen it coming,” said one person familiar with the situation. “And she had no allies at the company to warn her, either.”

Indeed, at the time Bartz was fired over the phone by Chairman Roy Bostock — who had until late this summer been her fervent supporter — she was set to appear at a high-profile Citigroup investor conference in New York.

“It had to happen then, because you can’t put a CEO in front of investors and analysts and then fire her soon after,” said one person close to the situation.

Actually, former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel stepped down only days after appearing at the company’s annual meeting and telling the gathering he was in for the long haul.

The Loeb problem also played a part. According to several sources, while Loeb did not surface until after Bartz’s firing, several directors and Silicon Valley players were aware of his plans to target Yahoo.

While Loeb was not the more heavyweight threat that activist investor Carl Icahn had been in the past, sources said he was planning to call for Bartz’s firing, as well as a board re-do.

The large part of the reason for letting her go finally, of course, centered on not meeting performance goals set by the board.

While the overhaul of a hairball of systems and a rejiggering of staff was quickly done by the longtime and experienced manager, the turnaround and renewed product innovation promised by Bartz was slow in coming.

In addition, advertising sales results had worsened and recent quarterly reports showed little progress.

To remedy the situation, directors had asked Bartz to present a strategic plan earlier this year, which she did with the help of top execs. It further underscored the idea of Yahoo as a top-level digital media company.

But the board pressed for more details and felt Bartz was not the right exec to carry out the kind of dramatic renewal of Yahoo that is needed.

Looming, too, was the third-quarter earnings results on October 18, which sources said will show continued weakness at Yahoo.

For that, it’s likely the fired Bartz will get the blame, giving the board — which is also being criticized by large shareholders and others — a bit of breathing room as it figures out what to do next.

In other words, with no good news to report, the Yahoo board decided to deliver some bad news to Bartz.

(In related news, according to an 8-K filing by the company, interim Yahoo CEO and also CFO Tim Morse got a small bump in base salary from $600,000 to $750,000, effective September 15, 2011.)

And here is a video I did on WSJ.com’s Digits show yesterday about the buyer interest in Yahoo I previously wrote about, as well as its weak board:

What a difference a day makes.

In the 24 hours since Hewlett-Packard announced it was cutting production of its high-profile webOS mobile devices and might spin off its huge consumer PC business, stock of the tech giant has plummeted 20 percent.

HP shares are down $5.91 right now, at $23.60, one of the worst dives in its long history.

The reason? Wall Street is confused at what HP management and its board are up to.

So is everyone else, so get in line!

In any case, the one-fifth drop in value might be due to the length of time HP said it would take to execute its dramatically announced new plans. That is likely to keep the stock depressed, as investors are still uncertain what it all means.

One thing was clear: HP’s financial prospects are certainly dicey. Even as the Palo Alto, Calif., company announced its major strategic shift, it reported disastrous third-quarter earnings, included lowering its full-year forecast once again.

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You’d think there would be a party in Redmond, Wash., today, as software giant Microsoft soundly beat Wall Street expectations in its third-quarter earnings released earlier today.

Microsoft said it had revenue of $16.43 billion for the quarter ended March 31, 2011, which was up 13 percent from a year ago. Net income was $5.23 billion, or 61 cents per share, a rise of 31 percent and 36 percent, respectively.

The surge was led by sales of Office, Kinect and Xbox and a stronger economy.

But there are shadows, too, as results were dragged down by weaker revenues for its flagship Windows unit.

The report comes as Microsoft’s stock continues to lag, declining 14 percent for the year.

Buzz kill!

BoomTown livedblogged the call for Wall Street analysts:

2:30 pm PT: Peter Klein, Microsoft’s CFO, who sounds super peppy, outlined the strong quarter, especially for its Office products.

He also mentioned some glitches, such as Microsoft’s still-struggling efforts to increase revenue per search (RPS) in its longtime search and online advertising partnership with Yahoo and the slower growth of the PC sector upon which the software giant’s Windows relies.

PC should stand for “possibly crappy,” but good-boy Klein did not say so.

Investor relations dude Bill Koefoed also read through the news, sounding at times like a sports announcer on a cable television network.

“Quuuuaaadrupled…,” he intoned about one part of Microsoft’s business.

This all went on for a while, since Microsoft has a lot of divisions. Servers & Tools. Online Services. Entertainment and Devices. Fashion & Cute Tops.

Okay, not that one, but a girl can dream.

It was all fun and games until Koefoed got to the Yahoo problem, which Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz had used as a cudgel in her earnings report recently.

Yes, it is a bummer. But soon it was back to the happy land of Xbox!

Klein said he was pleased with the results in a jaunty manner, which made me desperately wish Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer led the call.

Because he’s always one obnoxious query away from a volcanic popping off.

Which is why I love those Yahoo calls and Bartz.

Buzz kill!

2:54 pm PT: That was fast–the call was quickly into questions.

The first is about COGS–cost of goods sold–and how it impacts gross margins.

Klein said the expenses were volume driven. I’d explain, but then I would fall asleep.

The next question was about stock buybacks.

That might get the stock up. Yeah, said Klein, they’ll keep doing that–not that it has helped much on the share price front.

More and more questions, about the PC market, the issues at Yahoo (let’s get that RPS up!), the Windows Phone 7 business.

I’ll be honest, I was a bit bored and started reading a riveting Business Insider interview with TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington on his myriad conflicts of interest related to his tech investing while also blogging as a news guy.

Whatever you think about him, that dude is good copy.

Wait, back to growth rates for Office!

It’s going great, said Klein (hey, maybe Arrington will invest!).

The call wraps up on news of an upcoming investor conference, being held near Disney World.

Oooh, party time!

Software giant Microsoft soundly beat Wall Street expectations in its third-quarter earnings released after the market closed today.

Microsoft said it had revenue of $16.43 billion for the quarter ended Mar. 31, 2011, which was up 13 percent from a year ago. Net income was $5.23 billion, or 61 cents per share, a rise of 31 percent and 36 percent, respectively.

Investors were expecting the Redmond, Wash. tech company to have profits of 56 cents per share, up 45 cents per share in the same quarter last year. Revenue was expected to come in at $16.2 billion.

As usual, Microsoft beating of expectations still has not helped its lackluster stock, which is down almost 14 percent year over year.

Its shares are currently down more than two percent in after-hours trading, to $26.09.

That’s due to worries about PC market growth, in the wake of an explosion of tablet and smartphone devices from competitors such as Apple and Google.

Most of Microsoft’s divisions were up in terms of revenue, especially its Xbox, Kinect and Office businesses. That offsetted slowing PC growth, Microsoft said, as well as a 4.5 percent drop in revenue in its flagship Windows and Windows Live division.

BoomTown will be liveblogging the earnings call at 2:30 pm PT.

Until then, here is the official press release:

letterheadFY11Q3 –

The company’s nine-month results ended Dec. 31 included revenues of $954.6 million, jumping 80 percent, compared with the same period a year earlier. In that same period, income from continuing operations totaled $76.2 million, or 88 cents a diluted share, compared with a loss of $98.4 million, or $1.27 a share, for the year-ago period.

Third-quarter net revenues totaled $334.3 million on earnings of 45 cents per diluted share. That easily beat analyst expectations, which had forecasted revenues of $314 million and earnings per share of 34 cents.

The New York-based game maker, known for hit titles such as Grand Theft Auto and NBA 2K11, also increased its financial guidance for the fiscal year 2011. The company now expects revenues of $130 to $150 million in Q4, and revenues of up to $1.1 billion for the year ending March 31.

The company’s forecasts now call for Q4 non-GAAP earnings per share to be in the range of a loss of 40 to 45 cents, and for the year from 80 to 85 cents to easily beat analysts’ previous expectations of 62 cents for the year.

In a release, Strauss Zelnick, chairman and CEO of Take-Two, said strong holiday results enabled the better-than-expected results. Going forward, it’s evaluating new revenue streams. “These include opportunities in Asia and Latin America, evolving downloadable content models and online multiplayer experiences,” he said.

More to follow after the company’s earnings call.

One interesting revelation is that both Hewlett-Packard and Acer, the top two vendors by volume in the Gartner survey, saw their shipments decline year-on-year in a period where the rest of the industry was seeing growth, albeit slower than had been previously expected.

Hewlett-Packard maintained its market lead, with a share of about 18 percent worldwide, and 29 percent in the U.S. Acer came in second. Both saw their unit volumes decline. For HP, that translated to a decline of more than 200,000 units in fourth-quarter PC sales, or a little more than 1 percent. For Acer, which had hitched its wagon to the netbook craze a few years ago, it translated to a decline of nearly 2 percent, or more than 222,000 units. Dell, Lenovo and Toshiba all saw their shipments grow, with Lenovo leading the pack, growing a healthy 21 percent.

Gartner says that worldwide shipments totaled 93.5 million units in the fourth quarter, which amounted to growth of only 3 percent over the same period a year earlier, falling short of the 5 percent growth it had previously forecast. Gartner Analyst Mikako Kitagawa blames the iPad and other media tablets for the slackening growth. She says the industry’s one bright spot, oddly enough, is in enterprise, where companies are upgrading the machines they issue their employees. For the full year, the worldwide PC industry recovered from the recession, growing nearly 14 percent to 308 million units.

Apple remained in fifth place in the U.S. with a share of market just shy of 10 percent, and less than a percentage point behind Toshiba. Notably, this figure doesn’t include iPads, which hit a combined 7.5 million units in Apple’s third and fourth fiscal quarters, both of which ended before the holiday season. (Apple will reports earnings for its first fiscal quarter, which includes the holiday season, next week.)

IDC’s survey found the same trend, but it differed from the Gartner survey on a few key points. IDC put Dell in second place, behind HP and ahead of Acer in the worldwide market share race. I’ll attribute this to differences in methodology, since Gartner and IDC differ a little in how they count.

Another interesting note is that IDC paints a more negative picture of Acer, pegging its decline in fourth-quarter sales at 15 percent from 2009 to 2010. I asked IDC analyst Loren Loverde about the difference in IDC’s results versus Gartner’s, and he said part of it comes from differences in methodology, but also from the fact that Acer is closely held and so is a tricky company to track, and the data it does disclose isn’t as detailed as the other companies’.

But Loverde also says decline, whether 2 percent or 15 percent, reflects a stark business reality for Acer. The road to PC growth through mini-notebooks and geographic expansion is closed. It was a good strategy while it lasted.

I don’t think that qualifies as a surprise, given that Apple knocked the price of the gadget down to $99. And it seems that Apple’s foray into your living room has gotten further than Google’s, given the latter’s disappointing reviews and pre-CES pullback.

But I’m not sure it’s a runaway success, either. Some context: Apple sold nine million iPods during the third quarter of this year. And it took the company just 28 days to sell a million iPads after its April launch. On the other hand, it took Apple nearly two years to sell its first million iPods, way back in 2003.

Apple also says its customers are now renting 400,000 TV shows and more than 150,000 movies per day from iTunes. Bear in mind that those are being watched on all of Apple’s devices, not just Apple TV. But if you’re a studio with product to push, that shouldn’t matter–a sale is a sale.

Or at least that’s Apple’s argument to the studios, which have yet to give it all the product it wants, and the prices it wants. So far only Disney and News Corp.’s Fox (News Corp. also owns this Web site) have agreed to let Apple rent TV shows for 99 cents.

According to the report, from Asymco, AT&T saw iPhone sales grow from 2.7 million devices in the first quarter to 5.3 million in the third quarter. Verizon, meanwhile, saw total smartphone shipments grow from 2.7 million units to 3.3 millon units during that same period.

In particular, the report shows Verizon growth hitting a wall in August with sales of all its major smartphones dropping from August through October. Asymco, which based its report on figures from an ITG Investment Research report as well as results from AT&T, has some very pretty charts of all this (well, pretty unless you are Verizon).

A Verizon Wireless spokesman declined comment, while AT&T was predictably happy about the report. “This report validates AT&T’s approach, which is to offer customers maximum choice in handsets, operating systems and much more,” an AT&T representative told Mobilized.

Not to quibble, but the numbers seem to speak more to the power of the iPhone against all the choices in the world.

All of this is interesting, but may prove somewhat moot for Verizon once it gets the iPhone, a development widely expected to happen early next year.

The real lesson here seems to be for the smartphone makers other than Apple, particularly those that have been heavily promoted by Verizon. (Can you hear me now, Motorola?)

Motorola has already said it expects to take a hit in the first quarter based on expected developments at Verizon. But other Android-based makers could also take a hit as the arrival of the iPhone at Verizon takes away one of the top reasons people buy a non-Apple phone–they don’t want to go with AT&T.

That said, Google has been crowing about the growth of Android, with exec Andy Rubin tweeting last week that the activations of Android-based phones now top 300,000 per day.

Update, 3:30 pm PT: Asymco clarified that the ultimate numbers used in the charts and the report were its own, based on publicly reported numbers from AT&T as well as information from an ITG Investment Research report on Verizon. Also, the company said the total number of iPhones for the third quarter should have been 5.3 million, not the figure originally listed in its report.

According to Goodman, who obtains his data from independent wireless retailers, 80 percent of smartphone sales at Verizon in November were Android devices (46 percent of those were Droids). Which is astonishing for two reasons. 1.) That’s a huge percentage for a relatively new mobile OS in a very competitive market. 2.) In December of 2008, RIM was touting the BlackBerry as Verizon’s best-selling device. In two years, it’s gone from a flagship to a johnboat.

And with Android continuing to lead smartphone sales growth at Verizon, it seems increasingly unlikely that the BlackBerry will ever reclaim its lost title. With sales of the Tour/Bold series dwindling and no Storm refresh in sight, BlackBerry sales at Verizon are in serious decline. They dropped 45 percent year-over-year in the third quarter of this year, and Goodman sees them trending down 49 percent YOY in the fourth.

An ugly and humiliating decline, and worrisome. Because if the BlackBerry is faring this poorly against Android at Verizon, how will it fare against Android and the iPhone, which is widely expected to debut on the carrier’s network next year?

No wonder Verizon doesn’t think the upcoming launch of BlackBerry 6 devices on its network will have a “material impact” on sales. Why would it?

Incidentally, if you haven’t yet checked out our coverage of RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis’s appearance at D:Mobile earlier this week, you should.

And so does Google, according to Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, who lauded the company’s recent tablet efforts with some Jobsian descriptives Thursday.

Discussing Nvidia’s Tegra chip during the company’s third-quarter earnings call, Huang said we’ll see Google and its partners bring some killer Android tablets to market in the months ahead.

“Although they’re a little bit behind, the work that Andy Rubin’s team is doing at Google is just really amazing,” Huang said. “I mean, this is clearly a world-class engineering team. And they’re building a magical product. So I’m looking forward to the next generation of Android phones and tablets that are coming out. And I think it’s going to really, really surprise people and delight consumers everywhere.”

A magical product…that surprises and delights. Works for Jobs, right?

Well, at least he didn’t say “magical and revolutionary.”

Shipments of ‘white-box,’ or unbranded, cellphones rose sharply in emerging markets as Chinese manufacturers expanded into regions like India and Africa, taking market share from the larger cellphone vendors, Gartner said.

Unbranded phone makers’ rapid growth hit the combined market share of the world’s five largest handset vendors, which fell to 67 percent in the third quarter from 83 percent a year earlier. Overall, shipments of phones increased 35 percent in the third quarter from a year earlier to 417 million units, Gartner said.

Chinese makers, who typically build phones around chipsets from Taiwan’s MediaTek Inc., can push out simple devices at very low prices as they have low manufacturing costs and often copy older hardware designs from other vendors, Carolina Milanesi, a Gartner research vice president, said in an interview.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The U.S. used to be a cash cow for Deutsche Telekom, but it has struggled there since 2008 and has been forced to invest more to keep existing customers and attract new ones. In the third quarter it cost $87 to keep an existing subscriber, up sharply from $58 a year earlier. On average it paid out $134 to acquire a new customer, up from $116.

Even so, its success was limited; it gained 137,000 customers in the September quarter driven by growth in the prepaid business, bringing its U.S. subscriber base to 33.8 million, but the number of more valuable contract customers fell by 60,000 to 26.7 million.

Mr. Obermann was clear on the reason why. “Consumers like T-Mobile but they also want to have the iPhone,” which T-Mobile USA has no chance of getting in the short term, he said.

AT&T Inc. is iPhone’s exclusive U.S. carrier right now, with so-far unconfirmed reports that rival Verizon Wireless–the joint venture between Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC–could also be in line to get the device, potentially putting more pressure on T-Mobile USA.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

That should be an easy thing to pull off, particularly if the company manages to renew its deal with Howard Stern, whose contract expires at the end of the year. But it hasn’t done that yet, according to Karmazin. “We had hoped that prior to this call we would have an update on the status of Howard Stern with Sirius XM,” he said this morning. “We do not have any update today, other than to say discussions continue.”

AOL reports its third-quarter earnings on Wednesday, and investors are not expecting much, as its core dial-up business dies and its weak advertising business continues to lag.

In fact, except for all the hubbub about the various–and unfulfilled–scenarios around a possible hook-up with Yahoo, Wall Street still has a big wait-and-see when it has to do with the long-suffering company.

But that has not stopped CEO Tim Armstrong from using his well-practiced jazz hands over and over, in what is a laudable effort to create a credible narrative for AOL’s future as a content hub.

That’s included everything from cost cuts and layoffs, to acquisitions and the shedding of assets, to new advertising initiatives with sassy names such as the recent “Project Devil,” to new management, to–this week–a new homepage to show off the content.

As I wrote Friday, as it rolled out:

“The new version–with a clean and spare design and a rotating logo–prominently features local news, video and content from AOL’s network of sites, such as Engadget.”

Here’s a video interview of Armstrong showing it off with another AOL exec–and please watch to the end, when I ask him about the Yahoo situation and he deftly shimmies out of answering:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101101/aol-ceo-tim-armstrong-talks-about-the-new-homepage-and-not-though-i-tried-about-yahoo/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101029/demand-medias-ipo-is-on-deck-with-amended-filing/ http://allthingsd.com/20101029/demand-medias-ipo-is-on-deck-with-amended-filing/#comments Fri, 29 Oct 2010 15:18:49 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=36475

Demand Media, which posted its S-1 regulatory filing August, filed an amended version today that is likely to allow it to move quickly to an initial public offering.

The new version for the online content company has updated financial information for the third quarter.

Demand now must now wait for the Securities and Exchange Commission to approve the filing, after which the execs of the Santa Monica, Calif.-based Demand will immediately to go on a road show for several weeks to try to convince investors to jump on board.

Then, if there’s enough interest, the IPO is likely to come before the holidays.

Demand’s initial filing was to raise $125 million at a reported $1.5 billion valuation.

You can read the whole filing here, which shows an improved performance from Demand.

In its latest filing, Demand said it had generated revenue–from advertising and a domain business–of $179.4 million for the first nine months this year and had a net loss of $6.4 million.

In the same period a year ago, revenue was $102.3 with a net loss of $5.6 million.

Losses in the third quarter itself narrowed, to $305,000 from $4.2 million in the previous quarter and $1.9 million a year ago.

But Demand points in its filing to its “Adjusted OIBDA,” using less stringent non-GAAP financial rules, which shows a much improved $41.9 million profit compared to $18.9 million last year.

As MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka wrote:

Some investors may balk at these non-GAAP numbers, but Demand, Goldman Sachs and its other underwriters clearly think there’s a market for them. And there’s certainly a hunger in the tech world for a big, brand-name IPO to break the dry spell. You can feel people willing this thing to work.

If Demand did, say, $55 million in OIBDA this year, it would need a multiple of 18 times trailing 12 months earnings to get to a $1 billion valuation. It would need 27x to get the $1.5 billion number that people are whispering to reporters.

Another way to get to $1.5 billion: Project OIBDA of $100 million for 2011, and ask for 15x on that number.

Demand is definitely growing smartly from $170.3 million in annual revenue in 2008 to $198.5 in 2009 to possibly reaching–based on six months of 2010 results–well above $230 million in 2010.

That’s due to its increasing growth in traffic, largely via Demand’s popular eHow site and a network of others.

Almost all of the money is coming from traffic, and advertising, that it generates from Yahoo and Google–Google in particular.

Demand has done this using $355 million in funding it has raised since its founding in 2006. The company said it has only $29.2 million in cash and cash equivalents left, but there is also a $100 million untouched line of credit.

Hence, the IPO, which will give it both cash and stock to use to grow its content business, either organically or via acquisition, all while keeping the costs of content creation increasingly lower via innovative technology.

From Demand’s filings, it is clear such an effort is slow going, as it seeks to carve out any entirely new business model for content.

Now, it must find Wall Street investors who agree.

In its filing, Demand said it will sell 4.5 million shares in the IPO and current shareholders will sell another three million. It hopes to have DMD as its ticker symbol on the New York Stock Exchange.

But there is no price range yet for the offering, which is being led by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101029/demand-medias-ipo-is-on-deck-with-amended-filing/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20101029/apple-the-fourth-largest-mobile-phone-maker-in-the-world/ http://allthingsd.com/20101029/apple-the-fourth-largest-mobile-phone-maker-in-the-world/#comments Fri, 29 Oct 2010 14:52:30 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=51652

Hard to imagine this is even possible for a company selling a single smartphone, but Apple is now the fourth-largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world, according to data from IDC.

The company shipped some 14.1 million iPhones during the third quarter of 2010 to claim a 4.1 percent share of the market, more than Research in Motion, Motorola and Sony Ericsson, which it ousted from IDC’s Top 5 list.

“The entrance of Apple to the top 5 vendor ranking underscores the increased importance of smartphones to the overall market. Moreover, the mobile phone makers that are delivering popular smartphone models are among the fastest growing firms,” Kevin Restivo, senior research analyst with IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker, said in a statement. “Vendors that aren’t developing a strong portfolio of smartphones will be challenged to maintain and grow market share in the future.”

And to think that two years ago Apple’s goal of selling 10 million iPhones in a year was viewed with skepticism.

[Image credits: IDC and asymco]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101029/apple-the-fourth-largest-mobile-phone-maker-in-the-world/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101027/comcast-says-its-disappearing-subscribers-arent-cord-cutters/ http://allthingsd.com/20101027/comcast-says-its-disappearing-subscribers-arent-cord-cutters/#comments Wed, 27 Oct 2010 15:27:44 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=25132 Comcast lost 275,000 cable subscribers last quarter, and has lost 622,000 in the first nine months of 2010. More evidence of “cord cutting”?

Nope, says the cable giant. It’s evidence that the economy sucks.

That’s the short version of the company’s explanation for the drop, during its earnings call this morning: It had a variety of reasons to explain the exodus of subscribers, but all of them revolved around money that their previous customers didn’t have or didn’t want to part with.

A “small number” of former Comcast subscribers did appear to be swapping out cable for a free, over-the-air signal, said Comcast Cable president Neil Smit. But based on exit interviews, he said, they don’t seem to be planning on using the Web or services like Netflix, Apple TV, Hulu, et al as a cable substitute.

On the one hand, that distinction seems to be pointless, since someone who isn’t getting cable anymore isn’t getting cable anymore. Which makes them a “cord cutter,” technically speaking.

But those customers aren’t the ones that worry cable companies and Wall Street–or excite potential disruptors and their investors: When those guys are talking about cord cutting, they’re thinking about customers using the Internet and “over the top” services to get what they want.

So we’re still stuck where we’ve been for a while: Lots of people–many of whom are the kind of people who read sites like this one–say that cord cutting is either here or inevitable. And the incumbent cable companies say they see no sign of it.

As always, I invite you to let me know why you have or haven’t cut the cord yourself in the comments below this post.

Back to Comcast’s earnings for a second: The company would like investors to note that the customers who do stick around are handing it more money than ever. The average video customer now pays Comcast an average of $130 per month, a 10 percent bump.

And while those 275,000 missing video subs are more than Wall Street expected, Comcast says that things are getting better on that front, too. It says subscriber trends started improving at the end of the third quarter, and have continued to pick up in October.

[Image credit: zappowbang]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101027/comcast-says-its-disappearing-subscribers-arent-cord-cutters/feed/ 48 http://allthingsd.com/20101027/sap-posts-12-percent-profit-rise/ http://allthingsd.com/20101027/sap-posts-12-percent-profit-rise/#comments Wed, 27 Oct 2010 15:25:28 +0000 Archibald Preuschat http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=31622 Business-software giant SAP AG continued its recovery Wednesday with a 12% increase in third-quarter net profit, and maintained its full-year forecast.

The Walldorf, Germany-based company, which competes with Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp., said third-quarter net profit rose to €500 million ($692.6 million) from €447 million a year earlier.

The results missed analysts’ expectations of €560 million due to an increased provision for its upcoming law suit with Oracle. Costs related to its $5.8 billion acquisition of Sybase Inc. that completed in July also weighed on profit. Revenue increased 20% to €3 billion from €2.51 billion.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101027/sap-posts-12-percent-profit-rise/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101022/a-top-and-bottom-line-beat-for-verizon/ http://allthingsd.com/20101022/a-top-and-bottom-line-beat-for-verizon/#comments Fri, 22 Oct 2010 14:37:25 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=51169 Verizon reported better-than-expected earnings for its third quarter this morning–56 cents a share on revenue of $26.5 billion to the 54 cents a share on revenue of $26.4 billion analysts had been expecting.

But while it beat revenue and earnings targets, its wireless subscriber growth fell short of forecasts. Verizon added 584,000 new postpaid wireless customers, well below the 625,000 to 665,000 the Street had been hoping for. A bit of a disappointment for the nation’s largest wireless carrier, particularly since archrival AT&T added 745,000 postpaid wireless customers during the same period. That divergence means Verizon ended the quarter with a base of 93.2 million wireless customers–nearly even with AT&T’s base of 92.8 million.

Interesting, since this quarter saw the launch of some high-profile Android handsets on Verizon–the Droid 2 and Droid X, for example. Evidently, while “Droid Does,” it doesn’t do quite enough….

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101022/a-top-and-bottom-line-beat-for-verizon/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101021/amazon-beats-street-street-beats-amazon/ http://allthingsd.com/20101021/amazon-beats-street-street-beats-amazon/#comments Thu, 21 Oct 2010 20:41:50 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=51122 Odd that the 16 percent gain in third-quarter earnings Amazon reported Thursday afternoon would have a deleterious affect on the company’s share price, which had spiked more than 35 percent since last quarter, but that’s exactly what happened.

The retail behemoth’s stock price slipped some 3 percent after hours, evidently because of a disappointing forecast for fourth quarter operating margin. Amazon expects it to be between 3 percent and 4.2 percent. Wall Street had been hoping for 5 percent. And the difference between those two outlooks seems to have overshadowed the 51 cents a share on revenue of $7.56 billion that Amazon reported, which handily exceeded the 48 cents a share on revenue of $7.37 billion analysts had been looking for.

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