revenue

GM reacts to state of Washington's proposed EV surtax

The Washington State Senate last month passed a bill that would charge electric car owners $100 per year to compensate for not paying gas taxes.

In response, GM Director of Government Affairs Hal Lenox sent a letter to Washington Gov. Chris Gregorie asking the surtax be removed, calling the bill "unfair."

If signed into law, the tax would only apply to owners of the all-electric vehicles. The bill excludes vehicles like the Chevrolet Volt, which can run part of the time on gas. Still, GM spoke out against it.

GM officials say that because of the high cost … Read more

Pandora's longtime VP to step down

One of the top female executives in Silicon Valley is stepping down.

Jessica Steel, Pandora's executive vice president of Business and Corporate Development, is wrapping up her nearly eight-year tenure at the company, according to tech news site The Next Web.

Steel's role at the Internet radio giant was to lead the company's business development and work on strategic partnerships with device manufacturers, car companies, and more.

"The car is one of the most popular venues for radio listening and incorporating Pandora into the native environment of automobile dashboards makes listening to personalized Internet radio as … Read more

Twitter's ads bounce to cell phones

By way of advertising, Twitter's mobile platform is about to look a lot more like its Web site. The microblogging giant announced today that "promoted" tweets and accounts will appear in Twitter timelines on mobile apps for iPhone and Android.

"Today, we are taking an important next step in making our Promoted Products available to those users," Twitter wrote on its blog today. "This will help ensure that people see important Tweets from the brands they care about."

Before today, Twitter's mobile users saw limited advertising in its search function, but now … Read more

Path and the disclosure dilemma

Was Path's data privacy flap so bad? Or Pinterest's revenue revelation?

These Web ventures have both taken heat in the last day or so because they were doing things with their users' data or activity that those users didn't sign up for. I mean that literally. Implicitly, it's a different story.

When people signed up for Path (before today's update), they didn't see a disclosure statement to the effect of, "We read your phone's address book and correlate it with other users' address books that we've read in order to connect … Read more

Nvidia cuts revenue outlook, citing hard disk shortage

Nvidia has lowered revenue expectations for the period ending January 29, citing the hard disk drive shortage in Thailand.

Revenue for the fourth quarter is expected to be lower than the company's previous outlook provided with its financial results for the third quarter ended October 30, 2011, the company said this afternoon.

Revenue is now expected to be $950 million, plus or minus 1 percent, compared with original expectations of $1.066 billion, plus or minus 2 percent, provided on November 10, 2011.

"The global disk-drive shortage caused by the flooding in Thailand had more impact on the … Read more

Google's biggest AdWords customers might surprise you

In case you hadn't noticed, Google makes a lot of money in advertising. But would you guess that one of the company's single biggest sources of AdWords revenue last year appears to be Lowe's?

The home improvement chain and its competitor, Home Depot, are estimated to have spent more than $100 million combined on Google ad click-throughs in 2011. But it turns out that the finance and insurance sector is the industry that spends the most on Google, according to recently released estimates.

Wordstream, an Internet marketing software firm that helps businesses optimize their use of AdWords, … Read more

What's Firefox worth to Google? Nearly $1 billion

Don't let the StatCounters and the NetApplications of the world fool you: despite stagnant and even slightly negative market share growth, Firefox and its default search box is still extremely valuable to Google.

How valuable? The three-year default search deal that Firefox's nonprofit parent company, Mozilla, just inked with Google is worth nearly $300 million per year, according to unnamed sources who spoke to AllThingsD.

In a statement to AllThingsD, Google's senior vice president of search, Alan Eustace, said: "Mozilla has been a valuable partner to Google over the years and we look forward to continuing … Read more

Online holiday spending hit all-time high last week

Even though the economy is still having trouble kicking in to high gear, consumers are spending boatloads of cash on gifts this holiday season.

Between November 1 and December 18, U.S. online shoppers have spent a whopping $32 billion, jumping 15 percent compared with the same period last year, when sales hit $27.8 billion, research firm ComScore reported today. Last week's sales performance was most impressive, hitting $6.3 billion during the seven-day period ended December 18 and setting a new all-time spending record for a single week. Last year, online shoppers in the U.S. spent $… Read more

Will Facebook profits double Amazon's this year?

Will Facebook be more profitable than Amazon this year? TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington thinks so.

Arrington, writing on his new blog, Uncrunched, cited a source who said that Facebook generated $1.6 billion in revenue during the first half of 2011 and an operating income of $800 million. Assuming that same profit margin carries through the year, Arrington says, Facebook could tally an operating income of $2 billion this year.

It gets better, Arrington says. During the first half of the year, Arrington points out that Amazon posted an operating income figure of $523 million, which Facebook easily overshadowed. And … Read more