With the expected growth in the housing market and aggressive pricing bundles from service providers, the VOIP market, which has been hammered by the shaky economy over the past two years, should begin to stabilize in 2010, according to DellOro Group. The number of VOIP subscribers should grow, but the equipment market may contract a bit because of price declines, the analyst firm said.
- An improved housing market and aggressive pricing bundles by service providers will help stabilize an IP telephony market that has suffered through two years of deep declines, according to market research firm DellOro Group. In a report Feb. 10, DellOro analysts said they expect that the number...

BT and Cisco are partnering to create a cloud-based, hosted unified communications platform designed to make it more cost-effective for businesses to embrace UC technologies, which bring together voice, mobile and data services. The services will be offered through BT, while Cisco Services will build the underlying infrastructure and help sell the services.
- Cisco Systems and British Telecom are creating a cloud-based service to offer businesses hosted unified communications services. The goal of the partnership, announced Dec. 9, is to enable cash-strapped companies in a difficult economy a way to take advantage of the benefits of UC without having ...

Hit by the economy early this year, search advertising looks to be on the mend. For the second quarter in a row, two search marketing firms say U.S. spending on text ads on Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft's Bing improved--or at least got less bad. The results bode well in particular for runaway search ad leader Google, which reports its third-quarter earnings on Thursday.

(Source: Efficient Frontier)

Analysts have been saying for months that as the economy improves, search advertising is likely to return most quickly among all other forms of advertising. It's seen as the most measurable, and it's also easy for marketers to increase spending literally overnight because it's largely self-service, requiring no advance commitment. But Web companies from Yahoo to countless startups also hope that an uptick in search ads eventually will open up wallets for display, video, and other online ads.

Yesterday, the National Venture Capital Association published its fifth overview of the impact of companies backed by venture capital investment in the U.S. economy. The numbers are very interesting and provide data to support my theory that these high-growth startups are playing an increasingly important role in American business.

When I wrote Creative Capital, my book about the history of venture capital that was published last year, the 2007 NVCA survey that I cited found that as of the end of 2005 venture-backed companies accounted for 10 million jobs and nearly 17% of gross domestic product. The 2009 survey, which has data up to 2008, reports that venture-backed companies now account for 12 million jobs and 21% of GDP.

Another amazing chart to see in this report below shows how pervasive venture-backed companies are in the tech industry. In the software industry, for instance, 81% of the industry's 1 million jobs originate from venture-backed startups.

"The numbers and percentages went up because the vc-backed companies grew at a faster clip than the overall economy," says NVCA Vice President of Strategic Affairs & Public Outreach Emily Mendell. "There is something in the dna of these companies that sends them on a different, often better trajectory."

- Spencer Ante also publishes the Creative Capital blog. Click here to see more.

NVCA Venture Impact 5th Ed

It is very important to decide what type of camping you intend to go on before you decide on your camping accessories. When you are searching for camping accessories you will find that there are so many to choose from. With the way the economy is going now, people are trying to save money by going on camping holidays. You can have a quite comfortable time with camping these days thanks to all the wonderful camping accessories that you can buy. The first thing you need is your camping tent

Glass panel makers hit the brakes when the economy tanked last year. Now the economy is recovering — but they aren’t.

Yesterday, as part of his work as Senior Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, blogger Paul Kedrosky released a report, "Right-Sizing the Venture Capital Industry."

Now, I couldn't agree more that the venture capital industry needs to reinvent itself. That was the theme of my recent feature in BusinessWeek, Super Angels Shake up Venture Capital. But I was a little surprised by the way that Kedrosky went out of his way to diss the venture capital industry's role in nurturing innovation, even though I know the Kauffman Foundation has a bit of an anti-VC bent.

"The industry has become conflated with entrepreneurship in the popular imagination as well as in policy circles, with the result being a widespread and incorrect belief that venture capital is a necessary and sufficient condition in driving growth entrepreneurship," writes Kedrosky.

Kedrosky's big data point? Of the 900 companies on the Inc. 500 list between 1997 and 2007, he reports that only 16% received venture capital backing. It's an interesting data point. But to then argue that "venture capital and entrepreneurship are separate phenomena," as Kedrosky does, seems like an overstatement to me.

Obviously, most new companies do not require venture capital but the ones that do need it play a hugely important role in the economy because they tend to be the ones that grow the biggest and create the most value. Think Google, which got a $25 million injection of venture capital at a key moment in its evolution. Without that money Google might have never become Google. There are many examples like this.

The rest of the report tries to figure out why venture capital performance has been poor lately and suggests how the industry will reshape itself. The upshot? The industry must shrink, perhaps in half in the coming years.

I basically agree that the industry needs to shrink. That's pretty much what I argued in my super angels feature. The industry has an inversion problem: Fund sizes have gotten bigger while the capital needs of companies have shrunk. $500,000 is the new $5 million, as super angel Mike Maples said in my story.

Will it shrink in half? Maybe. Maybe not. All I know is that it will get smaller and that's a good thing for the industry and for the economy. An excess of capital ends up wasting money and the scarce time of entrepreneurs, and drives up valuations to unhealthy levels.

The more important issue to me is that the industry needs to develop new models to finance and nurture innovation that fit today's capital-constrained economy. Super angels will be part of the answer but it won't solve the whole VC problem.

My colleague Mike Mandel blogged about this issue, making the point that science-oriented VC requires more money and a longer time frame to come to fruition. I think he's right. And I've heard many VCs who invest in clean tech make this point.

Another big issue: Without an IPO market, there needs to be a new type of capital market that helps young companies finance their growth once they graduate beyond venture capital.

- Spencer Ante also publishes the Creative Capital blog. Click here to see more.

Yesterday, when Sprint Nextel reported impressive results of its prepaid division, Boost, a lot of analysts have begun to question how much longer Boost can produce such stellar performance.

Well, today I talked with Boost Mobile's president Matt Carter, and he says he's only getting started in marketing the prepaid offering. On May 1, Boost hired car racing champ Danica Patrick to promote its service in ads. At the end of May, Boost will roll out its first phone equipped with a Qwerty keyboard, Motorola's i465, called the Clutch. The phone should appeal to power data users.

What's more, by year-end, Boost, which currently only has three retail locations (in Houston, Miami and Los Angeles) and is mostly sold through Sprint's stores, will open 50 retail stores of its own. It will have 10 stores by the end of June.

So I wouldn't be surprised to see Boost's subscriber acquisitions growth revving up further -- and not just while the economy is in the doldrums. "The economy has given us a platform to make people more aware of the prepaid offering," Carter says. "I don't think people are going to go back [to postpaid plans when the economy recovers]."

Direct and indirect revenues from mobile applications should exceed $25 billion by 2014, "with growth fueled by a raft of store launches targeting both high-end and mass market handsets," according to a new report from Juniper Research issued on April 28. Can this be right? You bet.

Let's look at the world's most popular mobile app store to date, Apple's. In its first half a year in operation, Apple iTunes App Store generated no more than $100 million in sales, according to this estimate. But the rate of purchases has since skyrocketed, so that, recently, it's been estimated that the App Store sells $1 million worth of applications a day. That means that the App Store should generate at least $365 million in sales this year -- despite the downturn in the economy.

The growth is likely to continue to be exponential, as many app stores still await to be launched, and as most smartphone owners still haven't even tried downloading paid applications. Yet already, last year, 17% of smartphone users spent $100 or more on mobile apps. So it looks like people are increasingly open to spending on the applications.

Lost a job? Your wireless carrier may be able to help you out.

According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel can move people who've lost their jobs to lower-cost service plans without charging extra fees. Virgin Mobile USA has recently announced it will wave three months of service charges to certain customers who become unemployed.

Clearly, all these carriers figure it's better to make less money off their users than nothing at all. The moves could also increase user loyalty for when the economy recovers.

Google's first-quarter earnings are out, and while it managed to beat profit expectations thanks to cost-cutting, revenues were down 3% from the fourth quarter, about what analysts had forecast. From a year ago, sales were up only 6% thanks to what was by all accounts a pretty awful quarter for the entire economy.

On an initial look, investors appear to like what they see. Shares are up almost 6% in after-hours trading, even after a 2.4% rise in an up market overall before the announcement. UPDATE: Shares eased off as the earnings call went on and now are flat or slightly down. The reaction could be volatile well into tomorrow.

The reason for the lackluster response: If investors were looking for any reassurance that online advertising would emerge from its current slump, they didn't appear to get it. If even Google sees a sequential drop in revenues, woe betide the rest of the online ad business. And even for Google, merely meeting expectations on the top line isn't something that will get investors enthusiastic because it means business overall is still under pressure.

Gross revenues came in at $5.51 billion and net revenues excluding special items were $4.07 billion, just about even with analysts' expectations. And after years of rampant hiring that slowed down only last year, Google actually managed to cut overall employee count by 58 people from December, to 20,164. That helped Google earn $5.16 a share, noticeably over analysts' forecast of $4.93 a share. What's more, free cash flow hit $2 billion, bring its cash coffers to $17.8 billion.

Google said paid clicks, the number of times users clicked on an ad, which is how Google generates revenue, grew 17% from a year ago. That outpaced many analysts' estimates.

More than ever, these results are being closely watched for any sign of weakness at the search giant, which most analysts had expected would show Google's first-ever quarter-to-quarter decline in revenues. Investors also will be looking to the results, and executive comments on them, for any signs of further weakness in online advertising overall or, they hope, any signal that things are looking up.

After the jump, I'll be liveblogging the highlights of the analyst call, which begins at 1:30 p.m. Pacific. I'll continually update from the bottom, so keep refreshing to get the latest. There's also a 3 p.m. Pacific Q&A call that you also can listen to here.

A new survey suggests that this fall's introduction of windows 7 could provide a badly needed boost to Microsoft's corporate sales. A poll by ChangeWave reported by ZDnet found that 44% of the 68 corporate users testing Windows 7 were "very satisfied" with the software. A similar poll taken by ChangeWave in February, 2007, a few weeks after vista's launch, found just 10% expressing a similar sentiment.

The number of users survey is small and the results should be taken with a grain of salt. But the findings are consistent with what testers (myself included) have been saying about Windows 7 across the board.

Depending on the state of the economy and corporate IT budgets early next year, it's possible that Windows 7 could enjoy the fastest enterprise adoption rate of any version of Windows. A lot of corporations were relatively slow to move to XP because they had successfully deployed Windows 2000 and there was not a huge advantage to an immediate shift. And the bulk of enterprises skipped vista entirely. This means they are now running a very old operating system that Microsoft is laboring mightily to retire; "mainstream" support for XP ends next month. These factors could set the stage for a rapid ramp of Windows 7.

My long-time friend Annie Armen, better known as “The Hurricane” on Annie Armen LIVE Talk Radio, has just come out with a great new CD called “Legends in Excellence–The Series,” which features 20 of the world’s top authorities on success.                                                                                                             

Annie took hundreds of hours of recorded interviews she’s done over the past decade with people such as Zig Ziglar, Stephen M.R. Covey, Denis Waitley, John Demartini of The Secret and yours truly (just to name a few), and she edited all that content down into 15 hours of powerful advice on how to create real wealth, achieve greater success and find opportunity no matter what the economy is doing.

CLICK HERE to get more information and to purchase the CD.

When you visit the web page above, if you scroll down you can also listen to a five-minute sampler track by clicking on the blue-and-white play button above the words “Listen While You Read.”

If you listen to the sampler track, feel free to come back and leave a comment about what you thought of it.

When Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales launched his search service Wikia Search in late 2006, he was hoping to "fix Internet search by working to free the judgment of information from invisible rules inside an algorithmic black box." Meaning he was hoping to do a number on Google.

Not anymore. Today, he announced he's giving up on the service. "If there is one thing that I’ve learned in my career," he wrote on his blog, "it is to do more of what’s working, and less of what’s not." And Wikia Search, which used human collaboration like on Wikipedia in an attempt to produce better search results, clearly wasn't working.

Indeed, it probably didn't help that, as the Wikia Search site itself admits, "the quality of the search results is low." And so Google repels another supposed Google killer.

But there are plenty more still trying, even some in the same vein, such as Mahalo. What's more, Wales says he hasn't given up for good: "In a different economy, we would continue to fund Wikia Search indefinitely," he wrote. "It’s something I care about deeply. I will return to again and again in my career to search, either as an investor, a contributor, a donor, or a cheerleader."

So as long as Google keeps minting money, would-be rivals will keep trying.