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Numbers, Volume 28

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We “don’t do numbers” here at RedMonk, but I come across many interesting numbers each week. here are some:

Cashing in on embarrassing pictures

Facebook’s annual revenue could come in at $550 million, according to the company. Silicon Alley Insider ran a few estimates pegging the revenue breakdown this way:

  • $125 million from brand ads
  • $150 million from Facebook’s ad deal with Microsoft
  • $75 million from virtual goods [Holy crap! -Coté]
  • $200 million from self-service ads

Reading the mint.com tea-leaves

Benchmark Capital led a $12M Series B round in March of 2008 and there’s no way they are happy with the outcome. For arguments sake, let’s assume they put in $6M of the $12M round and the Company was valued at $60M post money (both are somewhat arbitrary guesses and likely inaccurate but this is a ballpark placeholder. Valuations were falling at the time but Mint was a hot deal). Even then, Benchmark would have gotten about 3X or about $18M of the $170M. For a firm that just raised a $500M fund, $18M doesn’t move the needle very much. Needless to say, Benchmark was expecting needing a much bigger return.

There is no doubt that Mint is/was one of the more promising Web 2.0 startups yet Benchmark didn’t come close to making enough money to make their LPs happy. So what does this say for $500M funds and their ability to invest in Web startups?

Admitting who you are

Balsamiq Studios is doing it right. Read their company page. It’s says “Hello.” It says “Yes, a couple of guys in a studio.” They don’t skirt the issues of being a small company:

I know, it sounds iffy: how can such a small team create, test, maintain, market, sell, and support a software company?

Well, that remains to be seen – but Balsamiq made $800,000 in their first year of operations, so don’t tell me “big companies” need to hear garbage PR/marketing language. And Balsamiq got 100 product reviews during their first six weeks of operation, so don’t tell me “a couple of guys in a studio” isn’t a good public persona.

SaaS office

Re-purposed hotel phone bank

The study’s main finding is that about 1-in-5 companies reported that Google Docs is “widely used” in their workplace, however possibly as a compliment to Microsoft Office. IDC surveyed 262 people, a significant number of whom are senior managers at various sized businesses, which points to rapidly increasing interest in Google’s cloud-based office application.

A similar survey by IDC, a sister company of Computerworld ‘s parent company, IDG, in December 2007 found that 5% of those surveyed reported that Google Docs was “widely used” at their workplace. IDC’s most recent survey, done in July, found wide use of Google Docs in 19.5% of the companies surveyed.

Browser Share

There are now more users running some variant of Firefox (50.6 percent) than not running it, according to the latest statistics from the exo.performance.network.

Meanwhile, from Google-land:

[W]hile Chrome currently has just under 3 percent of the browser market currently, a year from now, they’re planning to have at least 5 percent. More importantly, 2 years from now, if Chrome doesn’t have at least 10 percent share, Google will be “exceptionally disappointed,” Chrome Engineering Director Linus Upson told Reuters. And Google’s own internal projections for the browser are even higher, apparently.

Creeping Bing

The new search engine, which was first brought out in May to do battle with rival Google, saw its share of the search market grow by 22.1 percent from 9 percent in July to 10.7 percent in August. The results made Bing the fastest growing search engine in the top 10 list, according to the Nielsen Co.

Mainframes, you know you want ’em

James Love CICS

According to a study out today of 300 users by researchers at IDC nearly one-half of said they plan to increase annual spending on mainframe hardware and software over the next five years. Only IBM mainframe users were included in the survey population, IDC noted….And IBM’s mainframes haven’t been immune to the economic downturn. This summer IBM reported that System z mainframe server revenue decreased 39 percent year-over-year in the second quarter, while overall company revenue declined 13 percent.

Austin Jobs

The [Austin] area lost 7,200 jobs between August 2008 and last month, a 0.9 percent drop. The decline was 0.2 percent in June and July, according to the Texas Workforce Commission.

The losses were concentrated in the manufacturing sector, where the annual loss rate was 11.5 percent. That reflects continuing job cuts by high-tech companies including Samsung Austin Semiconductor and Applied Materials Inc. and their suppliers.

Disclosure: see RedMonk clients for clients mentioned above.

Categories: Numbers.