revenue

Updated at 12:15 p.m. PST with information from iSuppli.

Nvidia is slashing fourth-quarter revenue guidance 40 percent to 50 percent. This comes on the heels of Intel's revision last week. Both companies are citing collapsing demand from customers.

"Total revenue for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009 is now expected to decline 40 percent to 50 percent sequentially as a result of further weakness in end-user demand and inventory reductions by Nvidia's channel partners in the global PC supply chain," the largest graphics chip supplier said in a statement Tuesday.

This revises the fourth-quarter … Read more

It was only a matter of time. Social network Facebook says it has hit the milestone of 150 million active users, just more than two months after reaching 120 million and about four months after reaching 100 million. The site hit 140 million in the middle of December.

The announcement was made on the Facebook company blog by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Should Facebook sustain this rate of growth, the 5-year-old site could hit 200 million users before Zuckerberg reaches his 25th birthday this spring.

Nearly half of those 150 million members, Zuckerberg wrote, use Facebook every day. Most … Read more

Another sign that Twitter is finally growing up: The company has put out a job posting hunting for a product manager to help it start raking in revenue. The San Francisco start-up, flush with venture funding and media hype, has yet to make a cent.

"As Twitter's first product manager focused on revenue generation, you will play a defining role in the formulation of Twitter's business," the job description reads.

Gee! You don't say?

Twitter CEO Evan Williams has hinted that the future of Twitter lies in some sort of corporate accounts. And indeed, the … Read more

Can the chip industry doldrums get any worse? Yes, Gartner says. In fact, semiconductor sales may set a record for consecutive yearly declines.

The market research firm on Tuesday predicted that in 2009, the chip industry will see back-to-back yearly declines for the first time in its history, with global chip revenue expected to decline 16.3 percent, to $219.2 billion.

Sales in the fourth quarter of 2008 will post a historic decline too, sinking to a record quarter-over-quarter decline of 24.4 percent, surpassing the 20 percent decline record set in the second quarter of 2001, the firm … Read more

There's a big Wall Street Journal piece on Tuesday about how MySpace is still seriously beating Facebook in the advertising and marketing game, regardless of the fact that Facebook has started to breeze past it in traffic.

This is one of those stories geared toward the Journal's less technical readers, undoubtedly, since most of the details are no surprise to social media junkies. But the take-home point is a good one: Big media ownership has been helpful to MySpace, whereas the independent Facebook is still learning the advertising game.

MySpace is owned by News Corp. (which also owns … Read more

Updated at 2:50 p.m. with correction of comments in FORM 10-Q

Intel reiterated in an SEC filing Friday that business conditions may worsen and that demand for its chips may take a hit because of global economic conditions.

As a result of the recent financial crisis, "there could be a number of follow-on effects from the credit crisis on Intel's business, including insolvency of key suppliers resulting in product delays; inability of customers to obtain credit to finance purchases of our products and/or customer insolvencies," Intel restated in a FORM 10-Q filing.

Intel also … Read more

I've talked before about the close affinity between open source and SaaS, including that SaaS is built using open source, but it's only been this week that it the full import of open source-begets-SaaS came home to me.

Perhaps it was seeing Zimbra and OpenX both announce hosted offerings of their respective open-source email and ad server offerings.

Or perhaps it was my conversation with Bill Kaiser, a friend and Greylock venture capitalist, wherein it seemed that the most interesting new venture opportunities were in SaaS, and that open source has not resolved one of the fundamental problems with enterprise software: it's too complex, too cumbersome, and too Soviet in its design aesthetic.

This thought was underlined by Terry Barbounis, a friend and Christian Science Monitor CTO, who practically gushed about the positive experiences with SaaS offerings like Jive Software's Clearspace he has been having lately.

Open source is a massive upgrade over the proprietary lock-in of incumbent enterprise software solutions. It returns control to customers and makes it easy for them to try software for free and without obligation, as well as to tailor it to their individual needs.

But open source has not gone far enough - at least, as a movement - in addressing the need for software that is easy to pay for and use.

Intriguingly, somewhere in that need open source can be forgotten, as Dusty Davidson of BrightMix, an OpenX customer, unwittingly reveals in endorsing OpenX's hosted version:… Read more

I had a fascinating conversation with a Silicon Valley VC this morning. He has successfully invested in a range of open-source and software-as-a-service companies, and made a somewhat startling comment:

It's becoming harder and harder to discern between open-source and SaaS companies. Their revenue looks increasingly similar, as do their business models. It's becoming hard to tell, for example, whether SugarCRM is a SaaS company or an open-source company. In reality, it's both, and it's hard to tell where one begins and the other ends.

He is absolutely right, at least about the blending of SaaS and open source. As I noted in a previous post on SaaS business models, both open source and SaaS have increasingly turned to "freemium" models. Both are all about getting software in the hands of prospective customers as fast as possible, and looking to monetize that adoption downstream rather than upfront. Both provide a lower cost of entry and (often) a long-term cost savings, with a subscription-based revenue model.

Intriguingly, he told me that SaaS vendors have discovered that there is very little cost to supporting a customer, and little risk of churn once the customer is actively using the product. So more SaaS companies are finding ways to give away free versions of their service (which costs them little), monitoring actual usage, and sending in the sales team once adoption starts to increase. Sounds like open source, right?… Read more

Online auction giant eBay lowered its fourth-quarter revenue expectations and reported third-quarter numbers that met analyst forecasts.

Company executives said Wednesday that it expected fourth-quarter profit to come in between 25 cents to 27 cents per share, compared with the 39 cents it reported during the same period in 2007.

For the third quarter, eBay's earnings came in at the low end of Wall Street expectations with revenues of $2.12 billion, up $228 million from the third quarter of 2007. Net profit was $492 million, or 38 cents per share. Analysts predicted that eBay's earnings for the … Read more