Affiliate Programs and Affiliate Reviews
One of my favorite Mark Twain quotes is, "History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes." I thought of it again last week when I read about the price war going on in the Infrastructure as a Service space. Larry Dignon made the clever observation that he paid more for electricity in January than it cost to get IT infrastructure now that Microsoft and Amazon have decided to double down on the infrastructure game.
Now is a good time to be a startup looking for funding, suggests the Halo Report, which provides data and identifies trends affecting early stage entrepreneurs and investors. Angel Resource Institute, Silicon Valley Bank and CB Insights collaborated in the development of the report. Most notable among its findings: The median round size for angel group investments grew to $700,000, an increase of 40 percent over 2010.
The global marketplace for broadband services is dynamic and growing. At the end of 2011, approximately 660 million households subscribed to an Internet service, and about 580 million — 32 percent of all global households — received broadband service. The populous countries in Western Europe have high broadband penetration, but predictably, they are showing signs of slowing growth.
I spent the best part of last week cruising up and down Silicon Valley, checking in with customers and would-be clients. The consensus from this non-scientific survey is that business is better than OK, and most people are expecting this year to be the best in a while. Of course, there is a cloud — literal and figuratively — to go with that silver lining.
Last week Oracle bought the HR SaaS company Taleo for $1.9 billion, which to me means it’s time to do you-know-what to the fire and call in the dogs. This hunt is officially over and out. The hunt in question is for legitimacy and primacy of the SaaS and cloud computing model.