With great wealth comes great responsibility.
That's how we judge the tycoons of tech. While many of them spend their money on expensive luxuries, like cars, houses, planes — even islands — they are also expected to use their prosperity to do good works.
That's the implicit demand of the tech industry.
Some are astoundingly generous, giving tens of millions —even hundreds of millions — to their favorite causes. How much they give says a lot about them. Which causes they support does, too...
There are not very many billion-dollar consumer Internet companies in the U.S.
Greylock Partners VC James Slavet recently dove head-first into the data, and found that there are only 24 publicly traded consumer Internet companies worth $1 billion or more in the U.S.
Of those 24 companies, two-thirds of them are digital transaction firms, including Priceline, Expedia, Groupon, Amazon, eBay, and Netflix.
The combined value of all Bitcoins in circulation surpassed $1 billion this Thursday, as the exchange rate for each individual unit of the encrypted digital currency rose above $92. The milestone comes as the total number of Bitcoins nears 11 million and represents a huge jump from the record value of $32 recorded just one month ago. At the time of writing, the currency's market capitalization has dipped back below the billion mark, but small ups and downs are not uncommon — the current rate listed on Mt. Gox, the most popular Bitcoin exchange, is still well above $90.
Today, YouTube announced that it has hit a billion monthly users, which is an extremely insane metric. We know that YouTube is the go-to place for silly, interesting and important videos, but these numbers are something that even TV networks dream of.
The great part for YouTube is that this means that online video ad-spend will go up, since the eyeballs appear to be ready, willing and able. It’s not only advertisers that are rushing YouTube, budding music artists are heading there too, and making a career from the attention that they get.
Fueling this insane growth is the availability of YouTube on all devices, plus a growing interest from “Generation C,” which happens to love to curate. That content curation means that people are sitting in front of their device and watching video after video with genres that range from politics to cartoons.
Apple has paid out a total of $8 billion to App Store developers, Apple CEO Tim Cook said at Goldman Sachs' Technology and Internet conference yesterday.
Last month, Apple announced that it had paid $7 billion to developers for their apps. So in a little over one month, Apple paid out an additional $1 billion.
he 25 largest banks in the country had a rather exciting first week of January. According to data released by the Federal Reserve, depositors withdrew an astounding $114.1 billion during the week ending January 9. A significant portion of this withdrawal can be attributed to the expiration of the Transaction Account Guarantee (TAG) program.
The TAG program provided extra insurance protection for depositors, ensuring their balances, in case their bank becomes insolvent. Extending TAG was part of the fiscal cliff negotiations, but it didn’t make it into the final agreement.
It isn’t too common for Wall Street analysts to be very wrong. They have good indicators and past performances upon which to generate their predictions and it’s often more accurate than the weather. With Google’s Q4 2012 analysis, they were wrong by a mile even at Google’s revenue standards.
They reported $14.42 billion in the last quarter and earnings per share of $10.65 on a non-GAAP basis. Analyst had expected that Google would have revenues of $12.3 billion.
“We ended 2012 with a strong quarter,” said Larry Page, CEO of Google. “Revenues were up 36% year-on-year, and 8% quarter-on-quarter. And we hit $50 billion in revenues for the first time last year – not a bad achievement in just a decade and a half. In today’s multi-screen world we face tremendous opportunities as a technology company focused on user benefit. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be at Google.”
eBay reported strong earnings today, thanks to growth in mobile adoption, as well as improved performance in the Marketplaces business. The company also released its mobile commerce numbers for the year, which blew past original estimates.
In 2013, eBay expects each to exceed a whopping $20 billion.
PayPal and eBay both expected $10 billion in sales/payments volume for the year, individually. However, eBay mobile finished the year with $13 billion in volume – more than double the prior year – and PayPal mobile handled almost $14 billion in payment volume, more than triple (250 percent exactly) the prior year.
Everyone knows about Google’s search domination. Most are aware of their foray into social media and other internet-based engagements. Some know that they’ve ventured into hardware with driverless cars, nifty glasses, and various attempts at computers. What many do not realize is that Google is deeply embedded into renewable energy and has just invested in their 10th green venture, bringing the total to 10 with investments over $1 billion.
Their $200 million stake in Spinning Spur in the Texas panhandle makes 5 wind projects to match their 5 solar projects. They now have investments that can produce up to 2 gigawatts of power. That energy could power half a million homes for a year, more than enough to cover their massive server power consumption.
It's official: Psy's "Gangnam Style" is the first video ever to hit a billion views on YouTube.
For most mortals on video sharing networks, hitting the 1 million views milestone is a feat. For Psy's dance hymn, which was uploaded to YouTube on July 15, millions of views are racking up every hour. It took approximately three hours for the video to go from 995 million to a billion.
Billion, with a B. An email to every single one of its users—so actually a little over a billion at this point. In other words, one seventh of the entire Earth's population is getting hit with one message.
The blast—the largest email dispatch Facebook has ever sent out in its history, and certainly one of the biggest non-spam deliveries in email history—isn't even of anything particularly thrilling. In short, Facebook used to allow users to vote on certain policy changes if enough people chimed in—now they're going to phase that out, which doesn't matter because nobody really used this system anyway.
So as not to cause some sort of explosion, Facebook told us it'll be sending the messages out in waves But still! One billion emails. One billion people, hypothetically all reading the exact same thing. How many times has that happened in human history? I would venture not that many times! Of course, if you add in all the people who will die between now and then, spam filters, people who just delete everything, and those mutants with 95,000 unread messages in their inbox, the number will be lower than 1,000,000,000.
For the first time ever, the number of smartphones in use worldwide surpassed the one billion mark, according to findings from Strategy Analytics. Additionally, the number of mobile phone subscriptions reaches six billion, says research from International Telecommunication Union.
Since the first modern smartphone, the Nokia 9000 Communicator in 1996, it has taken 16 years for the amount of smartphones in use to exceed one billion units. The report from Strategy Analytics suggests that by the third quarter of 2011, 708 million smartphones were in use worldwide.
On Google's Q3 2012 earnings call yesterday, CEO Larry Page said the company had an $8 billion mobile revenue run rate, and CFO Patrick Pichette added, "Ads continue to be the bulk of [the $8 billion], the vast majority of it."
They declined to break that number down any further.
There's one major problem with this number...
The takeaway from Google’s prematurely released earnings report: They still haven’t figured out mobile. The company came up a half a billion dollars short of what analysts had projected for the quarter. Here are some explanations.
The first modern smartphone is generally considered to have been the Nokia Communicator, released in 1996. It was large and clunky, had a flip keyboard and a awkward antenna. Boy, how things have changed. Multiple companies now churn out increasingly amazing models with incredibly slick designs, intuitive features and hundreds of thousands of fun and useful apps. A billion people around the globe now have supercomputers in their pockets. The implications are dramatic and only beginning to be understood.
GADGETOSE
Google Play this morning announced that it had its 25th billion download (and they’re only counting Apps). In celebration Google is offering a bunch of apps and games on sale for just $0.25 over the next five days. Seems like a good time to stock up, thanks Google.
Has Twitter really hit 500 million users, as a new study claims — or is the company drowning in fake accounts?
Twitter tends to be very careful when it comes to announcing user numbers. Wary of its problem with bots and spam accounts — such as the thousands that have started following Mitt Romney in the past few weeks — the company appears to have a policy of only discussing the number of active users.
Back in September 2011, in a State of the Union-style talk at Twitter headquarters, CEO Dick Costolo said there were 100 million active users who log in at least once a month, while 50 million log in every day. On the company’s sixth birthday back in March, it announced the number of active users had reached 140 million — though it didn’t specify whether or not that was monthly logins...
Let’s be honest, we all get a little jealous when we see how young these billionaires really are and how much money they make. Most of us would have to work many lifetimes in order to come even close to what these five billionaires generate, but how do they make so much money?
Find out how each of these young billionaires made their billions through this very interesting infographic.
Facebook has 955 million monthly active users and 552 million daily active users, the company announced today.
When Facebook last reported its user numbers, it had just more than 900 million monthly active users and 525 million daily active users.
Facebook also has 543 million monthly active users on mobile. Facebook reported it had 488 million users on mobile during its IPO road show.
Netflix yesterday announced that its viewers watched over 1 billion hours of video over the course of June, which comes down to about an hour of video per subscriber per day. At the time I wrote about it, I pointed out that chances are, each hour of Netflix viewing means one less hour being watched of regular old live TV.
BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield extrapolated that data and declared Netflix the “most viewed cable network on television.” (Free registration required) It’s an imperfect comparison for a number of reasons, in part due to the number of accounts that Netflix subscribers share per household. But it’s indicative of the shift in attention that’s occurring, as viewers begin to watch less broadcast and cable television, and move toward on-demand shows that are streamed online.
